Sketchbook Maths
All us creative types can do figures can't we?
The orange sketchbook was a gift from my husband which is lovely. It’s a Royal & Langnickel which is fancy. It’s orange which I like.
The paper is a bit thin and paint bled through it so I decided to only use every other page.
When I started this sketchbook I hadn’t done any observational drawing for about six months and I knew I’d need to get lots of rubbish drawings out.
Even so it’s surprising just how many rubbish drawings it takes to get a good one.
There’s roughly 97 spreads in this sketchbook. By spreads I mean:
left hand side page + right hand side page = 1 spread
From those 97 spreads there’s 3 spreads worth of drawings I knew I could share to social media and get a decent response in likes and comments. That’s:
(Me not knowing how to do percentages) + Google = less than 4% of shareable drawings.
The other 96% of the drawings are:
Me trying + failing = learning
Important point: Good drawing does not equal a drawing that gets lots of likes and comments on social media. Though it can feel like that if you’re not gentle with yourself.
Out of the 97 spreads in this sketchbook I also got 3 spreads of drawings that I really liked but I know will not get much in the way of likes and comments on social media.
They are all quite sqooshy and hard to read but I loved making the big clunky marks and they feel like the beginning of a creative thread I want to pull on.
So, in my fancy orange sketchbook I made:
3 spreads I was happy to share + 3 spreads I was pleased with for myself = 6 spreads out of 97
which is:
(Still not knowing how to do percentages + Google) = just over 6% of drawings.
Now I know to expect roughly 6% of my drawings to be successful I can draw in any fancy sketchbook and not be intimidated because I know:
100% of what happens in a sketchbook = (trying + failing + learning) = progress
A high speed video of the whole sketchbook if you fancy seeing the full debacle.
Further Reading:
I felt so seen reading these posts about how we drive ourselves crazy with comparing, trying to be perfect and the joy of making rubbish work
All my posts are remaining free and open for the foreseeable future! If you fancy getting me a cuppa tea that would be amazing! Totally up to you, we’ll still be friends!
Love this maths + art post Nanette! It all equals (see what I did there!?) a very interesting piece and a reminder that observational drawing isn’t about making good art, but about the process! I like to remind myself that I have an art “practice”, not an art “perfect”!
Thanks for sharing - watching the video, I would definitely give you a higher percentage! I have sketchbooks full of unsharable work with very rough pencil sketches of children and animals, and shopping lists, and random notes to myself - but I use them and refer to them a lot. I watched an LDC talk a while ago where the artist said she had been advised by her tutor that you should treat your drawing like a blocked pipe and that sketch books are a way of getting all the c**p out before the good work flows through and I try to remember that!