About book An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration From The Private Sketchbooks Of Artists, Illustrators And Designers (2008)
I just can't get enough of other artists' sketchbooks--it's like reality TV for creative types but, in my opinion, of a superior quality. It's amazing to get this glimpse of so many different artists and the varying styles, media, approaches, and philosophies of their private art journals. One thing they all mentioned was that they love the "bookness" of sketchbooks and I wholeheartedly agree, of course. This book is inspirational in a practical way - I opened my own sketchbook at several points and put down the fabulous ideas I found. A decent coffee-table sized book with drawing inspiration for sketchbook journalism, which I consider to be a good way of developing skills in draghtsmanship, while building a very personal and even light-hearted approach to life in general. Most of the drawings on display here look terrible by my own standards of realism), but then most of these sketchbooks are private and not finished works of art. And that's the whole point of the exercise, as the various artists agree. There are some excellent draughtsmen such as Mattias Adolfsson, Butch Belair, France Belleville, Robert Crumb, Amanda Kavanagh, Gay Kraeger and Christoph Mueller. The various entries are too obviously framed around basic questions such as 'How did you grow into keeping a sketchbook journal?' and 'What materials do you use?' and 'Are you frightened by the blank page before you begin?' and so on. The book itself sometimes feels like a big advertisement for the popular Moleskine brand of pocket-books that most of these artists seem to use, undoubtedly because of the strength of the binding and the quality of the material used. I prefer the cheapest of the cheap; it's not about the materials after all. Those can come later.
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I love flipping through this one to see what other artists do in their sketchbooks
—Mcshinske
