We all fill sketchbooks with doodles, experiments, preliminary studies and sketches but what happens to them once they have been filled, they often sit on a shelf, occasionally looked back on but mostly forgotten about. Whilst browsing online for inspiration I came across the The Brooklyn Art Library Sketch Book Project - what an amazing find!
The Library send you a sketch book which you can fill with whatever you like, you are only limited by your own imagination. Their mission is to allow anyone around the world to be creative. The library is located in Brooklyn, NY, open free to the public and the sketchbooks live there waiting to be checked out whilst others are out on tour in the bookmobile! For those who cant get out to New York you can check out the digital library online at https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library
I was so excited to receive my book but had no idea what I was going to fill it with! So many unanswered questions, what do people want to see? What will people find interesting? Should it be full of ideas and sketches or fully finished art works..... Well, the book is finished and now in New York, waiting to be viewed. I opted to fill it with coloured pencil drawings to help promote coloured pencil and show how the pencils lay down on different surfaces. I replaced a few of the pages with Fabriano, Pastelmat and Derwent papers whilst using Polychromos and Luminance throughout so you can see how the colours look on each surface.
Travel has been a big part of my life for the last 11 + years and so I used my photographs from the past decade as references to help fill the pages, I simply drew what I loved about each country. The world is a magnificent place and you can find inspiration everywhere and in everything. I included some of the locations that I personally found inspiring in this sketchbook, from Roma to Paris and Egypt to Greece along with birds, butterflies and flowers the book is filled with the colours of the world. My book 'A world of Colour' can be found in the digital library at https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/S4715466
