Friday, January 21, 2011

The Sketchbook Project


I managed to finish (or at least fill...) my book for The Sketchbook Project 2011 in time to meet the deadline, but just barely. I signed up for the project rather late but still had a few months to work on it. Unfortunately, I procrastinated pretty badly with it for a while. Only managing a few half-hearted sketches until well into December. Finally, while doing some Christmas shopping I found this fascinating book on the sale rack outside of Borders.


I had my inspiration for the rest of the sketchbook. But even then I didn't carve out the time to work on it. Thankfully the deadline got extended to Jan. 18th. I went into full-on marathon drawing mode over the MLK weekend (I think I did all or most of 14 drawings and all of the lettering in that time!). I had to pull out four blank pages and I doubled the pages (the paper was so thin that I decided to tape every other page together) so I ended up with only 16 spreads versus the 40 that were originally in the book. I cut a couple other corners by including one of my Jon Stewart stickers on one page and a selection of the ‘Faces of Flickr’ series on another.

Needless to say it was a pretty stressful finish. I really wish I could have ended with a drawing of Martin Luther King's powerfully defiant mug shot (which would have been drawn on the holiday dedicated to him) but I had run out the clock by that point.

I am however proud of most of the work I did manage for the book. And I think I surprised myself with the sheer volume of drawings I was able to crank out in that last frenetic weekend.

Check out the whole set at the ArtHouse Co-Op Site and all of my other work at my flickrstream.

5 comments:

Alex Zonis said...

Congratulations on finishing the book! It came out great! I hear you about what could have been done better or different, but isn't it always the case?...

The important part is that you finished it, and it is great! The mug shots idea was clever. And it was rather stressful in the end, I had that too.

Thank you for leaving a comment on my blog.

Sydney said...

That was just a big dose of awesome! :) I do so dig your skillz!

Cari-Jane Hakes said...

Looks great! Well done for meeting the deadline! I did a marathon session in the week running up to the 15th - a double spread a day (well, per evening). It was such a great project. It was good they extended the deadline - I wasn't ready to part with the completed book on the 15th!!

Dan Kent said...

Excellent sketches - congratulations! I like the way the portrait party ended up sandwiched in between the famous and infamous! :)

Erika Lee @ A Tiny Rocket said...

Congrats on finishing!

There is a newspaper in Portland that prints out all the mugshots in Portland for the week. I had a friend working on a series of people from the newspaper. So interesting. :)