ART Journal inspiration

Inspiration in an Illustrated Life

Journal yourself to sanity

I have just been so totally inspired by a book I have been reading, called An Illustrated Life: drawing inspiration from the private sketchbooks of artists, illustrators and designers.

Danny Gregory, the author, says: "Keep an illustrated journal to develop your drawing, painting skills, and deepen the way you see the world."

It is the best way to get inside one's (an artist's) head, to feel the raw creativity flow in a book bulging with drawings, scrawled captions, and thoughts. Looking through a journal is a one-on-one experience as you absorb the sketches and notes, with each turning of the page a fresh surprise, a new juxtaposition. The pages unfold like a story; a life. You see ideas unfold and deepen, risks, mistakes, regrets, thoughts, lessons, dreams, sights, experiences, all recorded sequencially, bound by self-imposed rules.

• It doesn't matter if its wildly improvisational with radically changing style, medium and subject to the extent that it is almost impossible to believe it was drawn by the same hand.
• It doesn't matter if it is utilitarian, rough sketches for professional tasks, adding to and subtracting as the idea gestates, unfolds, and hatches.
• It doesn't matter if it consists of post-it notes, pieces of napkin or other paper that has been written on, or pictures that attracted your attention, bills, stamps, tickets of events, travels, or admission to places, doodles, scribbles, found bits and pieces, collect anything and everything that talks to you. Stick it in your journal with glue.
• Whether you record worries, ambitions, aches, intimate details, anxieties, disappointments, obsessions with sex, death, failure, food, whatever; where your journal is your crying blanket, your therapist... Anything goes.

It is amazing what these people have done. Some drawings are definitely not museum pieces. That's what I like about it. We have enough places in life where we need to perform, this seems like a fun adventure without the pressure.

If you feel like getting it for yourself, I have added the links below.

Loot and Kalahari are for South African viewers, Amazon for International (Amazon does not deliver to South Africa. Anyway you have to pay taxes as it is seen as imports and then it costs more. Rather buy local.)

Loot shop

Kalahari online shop An Illustrated Life (this link should take you to the Kalahari online shop) I have found Loot's prices cheaper, but Kalahari has a much greater variety of books, CDs and other electronic equipment. NOTE: The nice thing about shopping online is that you don't have to get into your car, it gets delivered to you. The postage is less than it would take to get into the car and drive to a book store and when you get there they may not even have it, which means you have to go there again, and remember to get it the next time you are there. Hooray for online shopping!