Daily Sketchbook Challenge
January 2023 - January 2024
Sketchbooks filled to the brim daily, fulfilling a yearly challenge.
Overview
At the end of 2022, I decided I wanted to fill a sketchbook page every day for a year. I hadn't picked up a sketchbook in a while and my traditional artwork had been pretty limited for the last few years. Most of my artwork had been focused on digital pieces. I've made a handful of paintings or a pastel art piece you could hang up on the wall, but besides that I hadn't really touched a sketchbook in a good while. So I thought, why not challenge myself to get back in the practice of keeping up with a sketchbook and set a daily goal. I could just throw some ideas down on the page and I'll do this every day for a year and not care too much about presentation and maybe I'll be proud of the outcome.
Materials & Sketchbooks
Over the year (+11 days) in 2024. I managed to fill two sketchbooks. I was so close to finishing the second book, I chose to exceed my original goals of keeping up with filling a daily sketchbook page a year. Both books are 5.5 x 8 inches which I felt was a solid size to keep up with daily. The first book I completed in June 2023 and then immediately transitioned to the second book.
I set rules for the books. First of all, each page must have a matching page following the same theme, which I explain in more detail below. The first book had to be purely traditional graphite pencil and focus on surreal and realistic art with little pop culture influence. The second I opened up to all mediums, with a little more focus on color, and pop culture influences. The art forms didn't have to be surreal or realistic either and could be a little more abstract or include cartoon characters. For each page in the second book had to begin with graphite pencil. Despite a main component of the second book being the graphite pencil, throughout the book you'll find me using watercolor, paints, pastels, and using odd materials like origami paper, balloons, and straws. I didn't want to be destructive to any pages, but I did allow layering of objects to be placed on top of a page.
Another rule I set was to not repeat a theme for a page twice and make the books pages as unique as possible. To help avoid repeating myself, I kept a list of everything I was planning to do and what I had completed in notes on my Samsung Galaxy Note 22 Ultra. As I completed a theme, I would check it off.
Theming
Each page has a coordinated, matching page following a similar theming. The matching theme page is directly to its right or left, so you see both at the same time when the book is open. The only exception is that the first and last page match because these don't have a page next to it. As far as theming goes this could mean that they are of the same material in a different pose or setting, include figure drawings, continue a story, or alter the page next to it. In general, I rotated between six similar types of themed pages in the book to keep some consistency and help make sure I didn't repeat the same thing twice: an object, a sport, an animal, a landscape or place, plantlife/fungi, and something surreal. The second book I added challenge pages and pop culture pages to this list.
Challenge Pages
Another component to mix up the second book was to add "Challenge Pages". What these did was challenge my brain to think about some other factors other than purely drawing that would go into the page. A couple examples include the following: What if I took an ink drop or two, blew on it, and made a figure out of it? What if I only used a single line for a page and the lines cannot be rounded, forming only polygon shapes? What if I made a phrase out of a word and drew that phrase (ex: "Carpet" - "Car" and "Pet" which could be a dog driving a car)?
Outcome
My original idea was to avoid presentation, although I couldn't fight the urge to make it presentable. Each page is laid out fairly well, including the pages that are more sketches of figure poses. In this regard, maybe I failed; however, I can say I do like looking at something that looks nice. Each page seems to have some solid dedication and planning to it as well. Although, I definitely made sure to meet my goals that each page is completed on a seperate and single day of the year.
So for a year plus 11 days I put together this sketch book. I spent one to three hours on a page typically, maybe once or twice edged into four or five hours. One of the biggest challenges to reaching my goals was finding a dedicated block of time to complete a sketchbook page. There were definitely some days I had less time to spend on the sketch book or I was traveling across the country and needed to complete it on transportation. During my year journey, I went to Chicago for a weekend, traveled to some bordering states, went on a ski trip for a week in Park City, and took two West Coast trips. One of the cool parts of the sketchbook is that I would try to incorporate where I traveled into the book. For example, I was on a daily outing to the Muir woods in Northern California and I was traveling back to San Francisco, and I was planning to cross the Golden Gate bridge. So I thought before crossing the bridge why don't I just sit down, chill here for thirty minutes to an hour and just sketch the bridge that's right in front of me - a real life reference. And I did this a few times throughout the year's journey.
As far as places I drew - most of the time I spent at my home office, but I've also sketched on the greater DC area metro, several airports across the country, the Amtrak train, in the car. The process really made me more comfortable drawing and creating artwork in public spaces. And every once in a while I would catch someone glance at me doing my art or say "hey that's really cool" or "what are you drawing there?" I would often be keeping up with notes on my phone recording ideas and inspiration, take pictures, and paste reference ideas for pages. Most of the time, I'm thinking "what could I combine in a logical way to try to convey this aesthetic/emotion".
It definitely was very rewarding to finish the sketchbook the final day. I kept up with the sketchbook for more than an hour a day for over a year, and I feel accomplished with my goal. I put a lot of effort into each page and the sketchbooks feel complete. And the thought process that went into it was definitely fun to keep up with. Maybe this just inspires me to do a similar challenge in the future?