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Is a sketchbook practice useful to an artist? Or is it just a waste of valuable time and materials?

I love sketchbooks: I love the feel of them in my hands as I caress their covers, whether they are tiny gems or hefty tomes. I love the textures and weights as I flip through their empty pages, their blankness enticing me to load several into my cart with the promise of filling the pages with perfect images. I also enjoy gathering a variety of odd papers that lay about in my studio and making my own, messy, scrappy sketchbooks, with the promise of great things to come, artistically.

Face to face with new acquisitions, I come face to face with reality: fears that I will spoil these pristine art journals. After making one or two tentative marks, I stack them away with the other mostly empty sketchbooks that I have collected over time.  Days, weeks, months later, I may pull one from the shelf and maybe gather enough courage to make another mark before returning it quickly to the shelf. And so it goes, month after month: a collection of hardly used books.

I was never able to develop a “sketchbook practice”, but in recent years I have gradually become more comfortable carrying a sketchbook with me and using it. Little by little, I am finding  joy in my art journals, and discovering that they are places to record, learn and experiment. Perhaps I still don’t have a “sketchbook practice” as some folks may define it, but I can frequently lose myself with abandon in a journal and have an exciting, messy time. And that’s worth it to me.

A few small art journals - ink and graphite.

What are your thoughts about sketchbooks and a “sketchbook practice”?