Pulled out my old box of treasures and took some new photos of the content of my old sketchbooks after some heavy nostalgia hit. These drawings are from my time at University in Lincoln and include various formats including A5, A4, A3 and cutouts on various grades and weight of paper. I mostly used pencils, sharpies, colored pencils and markers. These are all sketches and drawings that I think turned out rather well. Remember that I've boiled these down from dozens of sketches, not everything you do can be a hit! Once you add a strong black to a drawing it looks finished far faster. If you are disciplined enough to keep filling sketchbooks regularly (which I am not) you keep your edge sharp. It's also great to document your process and sometimes a simple sketch can go on to become much more!
So a range of styles and techniques can be found in the drawings above, from university project prep, sketching for fun, learning techniques and thumb-nailing. Over the years you accumulate a lot of pages and I have been far lazier than I should have been! That being said, sketching can fulfil a great deal of purposes and is fun. Take your time and enjoy.
A couple of examples of techniques which let you use the white of the paper and negative space to fill out your pages.
 |  |  |
|---|---|---|
| Monochrome | Negative | Inversing |
Hint of the Day:
I can't stress enough the importance of investing in good paper! A higher quality sketchbook is so much more fun to draw in and it's really worth the couple of extra bucks..
Hope you guys feel positively illuminated at this stage. It ain't magic, it's sweat and practice. It's old newspaper, sitting on the floor for hours in awkward positions and using whatever colorful thing you find that leaves a mark. Don't forget to have fun too while you're at it!
I also encourage you to come by our Artbees Discord. There is a pretty sweet community re-emerging around #artbees with talent worth supporting methinks.
Furthermore I'd like to introduce @nyxlabs ,an art/blockchain project we've been working on!
I'll still be archiving my stuff for a while, still got tons of character studies, life drawings, illustration exercise and graphic design bits to show, watch this space for additional pieces in the future. Back to the drawing board.
there and back again,
ZeroOoC
Mirrored from Styx : https://www.nyx-labs.com/zeros-sketchbook-chronicles-episode-x2/
Not a serious artist, so I’ve never kept too many sketchbooks. But seeing the journey in yours is amazing! Love the different experiments there :) esp the negative space!
Thank you for your encouragement <3
It means a lot!
practice...practice...practice... :)
Always fun to go through old sketchbooks XD I've always bought half decent ones because they definitely do feel a lot nicer to draw on, though I've never really splurged because I don't draw much (I have a sketchbook sitting in my drawer that will never be filled, the two that are in said drawer do contain a lot of sketches and notes for my project that I keep referring back to).
Very much unlike mine, all your old sketches look amazing XD
I'm glad you like them...naturally these photos are heavily curated.
I'd estimate that for every "showable" drawing i've binned 9 others.
That's still a higher ratio than mine, I don't think I have any showable drawings from before 2012 (I probably thought they were showable at the time, looking back now it's all ew no XD).