Do You Keep a Sketchbook?

First of all I want to thank you all for your wonderful ideas for my disaster of a cardigan from the last post. I have some lovely ideas now, you are a clever bunch, thankyou!xx

If you're a regular visitor here you'll know that I've kept sketchbooks for many years. When I was at college I found them a bit of a chore and didn't enjoy them very much because they were filled with course projects. I know many artists hardly ever use them (and you could be one of them!) but it was only when I started to use them for my own enjoyment and not necessarily for the eyes of others that I became what I can only describe as essential to keeping creative thoughts flowing for me.

I'm going to show you a few completely random pages from a couple of years ago. I could show you more up to date ones but I have a feeling I might have already shown them here recently. :) Amalia from Pencils and Fireflies was kind enough to ask me to take part in her 'sketchbook show and tell' where along with a few other artists I shared some of my sketchbook pages. It was this that got me thinking about making this post.

 I like to play with shapes and different mediums, trying out colour combinations and patterns.

 Some drawings are from memory, some are intuitive and reflect how I was feeling at the time.

 Other pages are just total play and maybe a bit messy!

 A nice black pen and some blank pages soon fill up with plant patterns.

I like to try out patterns.

 The one below is a collage from a well known clothes catalogue that you might recognise? I love their fabrics so much but my goodness are they expensive to buy in real life! ;)

But on the whole my sketchbooks have become more of a visual diary, an art journal and I like to stick in other things from my life to look back at one day..... 

The page on the left isn't my artwork but I expect you might have guessed that already! ;)

These pages speak for themselves. I never thought I'd give this the light of day. :)

If I were to paint or draw in them with the intention of showing them to anyone, I wouldn't get anything done at all but to open a fresh page and sit with some scrummy colours or a nice black pointy pen, it's a way of getting it out of my head

and I would highly recommend it! :)