Inspiration from Old Sketchbooks

I saw a friend of mine today, and during our conversations, the topic moved on to drawing and sketching. It is a topic that comes up quite a lot in our conversations, and we’re often suggesting inspiring artists to follow on Instagram to each other and sending each other sketches.

Today she had asked me if she could check out my sketchbooks, so I found the two sketchbooks I had and we started flicking through the pages.

As we went through the pages, I found loads of little character designs and design ideas within their pages; from small doodles to animation ideas to t-shirt designs.

Beside some of the design were small notes and keywords that I had written to enhance the design idea beyond the image and into a story. I found that when I was explaining the idea to her and going into detail, I was describing it with passion and enthusiasm, as if I had only just come up with the idea. This was so inspiring; as I described ideas that had just a few scribbled notes and no pictures, ideas I had completely forgotten about, I could picture the image as a completed piece. It was like I had travelled back to the moment where I had only just come up with the idea.

Simply going through a sketchbook brought back the motivation I was missing to start designing again. Not only did I find abandoned or unfinished designs and ideas that I could go back to with new eyes, I was reminded that one of the sketchbooks was full. My friend was impressed by this, and I realised so was I. This was a milestone in my designing and I wanted to appreciate it, and its now become motivation to fill my next sketchbook, fuelled by the inspiration from my own forgotten archives.