eye_of_toad | art spam: sketchbook #6 (2021 January)

sketchbook: Peter Pauper Press, 8.25x11 in, hardbound (but perforated pages), 128 gsm
TLDR; 😡Would not buy again.

01

I hated this sketchbook immediately. I hadn't noticed when I bought it that the pages were perforated and just a few pages in, they'd already started tearing. (Some of my other spiral sketchbooks are also perforated but this is the only one where I had a problem with pages tearing just from normal use.) So inspired by rage, I decided to challenge myself to fill up the sketchbook in a single month. I've seen one-month sketchbook challenges before and I decided this was a good excuse. That required me to fill up multiple pages per day, which means a lot of this sketchbook is just garbage "studies" of other people's art and following "how to draw" video tutorials. It was actually kind of a freeing experience. Drop your standards and just fill in as many pages as possible takes the pressure off the feeling that any single drawing needs to be "good enough". So I kind of have a love-hate thing with this sketchbook. Still hate the book itself, but I enjoyed a lot of the process and even some of the art. And, oof, "#6 January 2021" ended up being a very unfortunate title on the binding. Yikes.

03

I was using this style of drawing to make a mood theme on my main journal, hence going to the extra effort of cropping out the background.

05

Some examples of my versions compared to the original YouTube videos that inspired them. (These particular channels did not stand the test of time with me and I am no longer subscribed. My favorite art channels are Art for Kids Hub and Draw So Cute, cheerful and easy to follow along.)

07

Well, that was a thing that happened. I'm so happy with this baby giraffe and was enjoying my whimsical drawings and hadn't seen any news yet that day. Ugh.

09

Halfway through the book and I still hadn't really accepted that this sketchbook was just gonna look like this. I always kind of want them to be these perfect art books instead embracing the idea that a sketchbook is for sketches.

11

I think this is my favorite thing in this sketchbook.

13

I figured out how to post unlisted videos to YouTube, so here's the whole thing:

Watch on YouTube

(I did a much better job of holding the camera still this time, but I still struggle to turn pages. Why is turning pages so hard?)

Let me know if there's anything here you want to see a better picture of, but for the most part this book is just a lot of scribbles.