{blogtober day 23} sketchbook revival 2024

For a long time, I stopped buying classes or joining in classes. I would go in with the best of intentions, and maybe even do a page or two, and then…just not. So so many. And yet this year, I’ve managed to complete not one, but TWO journaling challenges. First Messy May got fully completed and on time too, and just this weekend, I finished Sketchbook Revival just in the nick of time – two weeks after the last classes went live, and 12 hours before the class access was revoked.

The book itself was a fabulous warm up workshop to create a lay flat, hand bound book. It was nice to try a new-to-me binding method, and the skewed spine at the end is definitely a me issue, and not a lesson issue.

With 28 classes in fourteen days, there were always going to be classes I loved and classes that weren’t my cup of tea, pages I’m proud of and pages that I hate.

Of all the pages, my favourites were the collage ones. Mutli-textural collage is very much where I am drawn to in my own work, so it makes sense I would love those the most. I was also proud of the travel page, even though I completely misread the brief of the kind of image to work with.

On the flip side, I hated my gouache cat (though didn’t mind gouache as a medium with the still life, though I really need to learn to let it dry properly), and wasn’t a bit fan of my brush marker portrait. My least favourite class was possibly the daisy chain, which I didn’t end up finishing – I was running down to the wire and didn’t have time to finish classes I wasn’t loving!

Not just a lesson in arting, SBR has also been a lesson in what I appreciate in a class, that will help me in future to be more discerning in what I pick up. “Look at this picture and draw it” didn’t work for me. “See this picture and how we can break it down into rectangles to start” was much more helpful, and I ended up with a page I was proud of. I wasn’t looking for super explicit instruction, but some guidelines for trying something new was helpful. I found the intuitive classes both fun and frustrating – “lay colour down where it seems pleasing” can make for an interesting page, but “we ideally want to keep our work heading towards a circle-ish shape by the time we’re finished” would have helped me understand better what we were trying to achieve.

I really enjoyed the challenge though, and it is always satisfying to have a finished journal. It pushed me in ways that Messy May didn’t, and there are plenty of things I’ve learned that I can continue to use in my creative practice moving forward.

Today’s been a busy one, and half of me just wants to collapse on the couch and scroll reels. The other half of me knows that by bedtime I’ll be grumpy that I wasted my time scrolling reels, so instead I’m going to pop on another episode of Only Murders In The Building and pick up my knitting. I really should clean up the mess on the floor where I’ve been sewing a dress but that’s tomorrow’s problem – I’m too grumpy with it to want to face it tonight. If I angle my laptop juuuuuust right…. oh look now I can’t see it. Productive+chill evening mode activated – let’s see if I can get another repeat finished tonight.