Sketchbook Project 2012 - Part 1

I am participating in the Sketchbook Project 2012 by Art House Co-op. It will be part of the permanent collection at The Brooklyn Art Library AND it will also be digitized, so you will be able to flip through it online in full (it's also on my website.) This post is an advanced sneak peak. This is Part I. Click here for Part II. 

My theme is "Monochromatic."

I present to you, pages 08-23:

08-09

10-11

12-13

14-15

16-17

18-19

20-21

22-23

I've found every artist has an explanation of their sketchbooking habits (or lack thereof) and here is my (gigantic) explanation:
I don't usually keep a sketchbook and I don't really have a single, definitive reason for not doing so. A couple of explanations are: I find loose pieces of paper much more alluring to draw on, I like drawing on pieces of paper that already have something on them (ruled paper, receipts, reject scrap paper from the pile next to the printer, dried up palette paper etc etc.)

That being said, I have actually enjoyed working on this project and now I feel like I should try to keep a sketchbook more often. Maybe do one of these every year.

Most artists I've encountered who religiously keep a sketchbook do it because they enjoy recording the world around them. People, hands, buildings, streets, hands, animals, trees, hands, faces, hands, the subway.

I enjoy repeatedly recording patterns and shapes, and that's it. Patterns. Shapes. Repetition... And empty wide spaces if you want to count that as well.

It's still good drawing practice since all of these strokes have become muscle memory. I periodically come up with new variations of the same formula, but I always know what I'm doing and I don't have to think about it.

I also don't have a linear way of working on these. I started on the very middle of the book and haphazardly branched out from there. I work on a page, leave it, come back to it, leave it, and then decide if pages are "done" fully on impulse. If I feel it's done, it's done!

So, these sketches are like nothing you have ever seen in my portfolio. I have drawn like this for a long time (it started somewhere around 5th grade? and continued all through high school.) Not many people have seen these sine then, as I never found a place for them in art school.

The greatest advantage to keeping a sketchbook is it's my own arena to do whatever I please. I don't have to worry about perspective, texture, color, composition, proportions, line weights, anything. And  nobody can tell me what goes in or out.

There's only two rules:
1) only the blackest ink on the starkest white
2) no erasing.

And this time I broke both of them!

I toned the pages to get rid of the white and to also put something on them, therefore making it more alluring to me to draw on them. I prefer to have something on the pages beforehand since these sketches originated from drawing on perforated, lined paper, as a way to build off of paper that was already used. Habit? Probably.

Then, after I toned the pages, I didn't like how much the black ink clashed with the toned pages (and it bled through too much for my liking) so I switched to pencil and because of that: 1) the process was about x2 slower since ink flows much faster through the pages than pencil does, 2) I erased a few times.

The rule about erasing came about because no erasing is the whole point of an ink aesthetic, you can't hide anything. Why did I break the rule? Because I can! It's my sketchbook! Plus, you can still see ghost images of what I erased so, nothing is hidden.

So what you see in this sketchbook is purely visceral. It is the purest, most raw and most absolutely genuine Tati artwork you have ever seen.