6 ideas to fill your sketchbook
I think all of us know this feeling: you want to draw something, you sit at your desk, sketchbook in front of you, art supplies laid out neatly, you look at the blank page - and then your head is empty. Either you’re lucky and an idea strikes, or, more often than not, you start scrolling though instagram, pinterest, getting distracted, maybe you even put on a Netflix show and forget about the drawing you originally wanted to do. I hope to help you a bit through these moments - this blog post is here for whenever you need some ideas on how to fill your sketchbook.
You don’t have to look far for inspiration - most of the time, it lies right in front of your doorstep! Grab your sketchbook and explore your neighborhood, city, parks, architecture, nature! I often feel like the places I live in are very boring, but that’s probably just because I have seen the streets and buildings a thousand times. When I take my sketchbook, I notice how I start to look at my surroundings differently, appreciating the flowers in my garden, the way the sun hits the neighbor’s roof in the morning, the odd decorations in my local bookshop’s window display.
This might sound boring, but hear me out. There are soo many topics that i would like to learn more about, and drawing can make learning a lot more fun. Pick any topic that interests you - and it can really be anything: Architecture in Ancient Rome, Medieval Clothing, Horseback-riding, The Art of Making Coffee, Old Norse Literature, Animals in the Arctic, a city you want to go to.
spread about a local forest and its flora and fauna
I have my sketchbook in front of me and start researching - that can be watching a documentary, going to the library, Wikipedia, listening to a podcast. Then I combine interesting facts and what I’ve learned with sketches and visual commentary - you’ll find it’s also a lot easier to remember facts when you’ve put them into a drawing!
If you don’t know where to start, You’re Dead to Me is a podcast I love about many different historical events and people that would be so fun to draw to!
journal entry created during a class on Renaissance Art and Sculptures
I used to get lost scrolling though pinterest to find a picture that I wanted to draw. Now I ask myself, why? I don’t see any problem in using reference photos, especially if it’s just about practicing. But just taking photos from the internet can feel a bit impersonal, generic.
I can guarantee that you have a great archive of reference materials in your home - maybe you just haven’t thought about it yet. Family albums, scrap books, memory boxes, even your laptop image archive - it’s a hidden treasure chest! There will be portraits of friends, your grandparents, snapshops from a winter holiday, the house in Italy you spent a summer in - wonderful bases for sketching and painting. And the best thing is - all those pictures have a story behind them, making them more special to you.
referenced from a photo from a family holiday in the lake district ‘15
Museums are some of my favorite places to draw at. I like how often there are physical objects, rather than flat pictures. That allows you to walk around them, study them in 3D, chose the angle you want to draw them from - such as vases, animals, sculptures. But art museums can be fun too, to do master studies or look at line work, color schemes, brush strokes, compositions. If possible, I like to go on weekdays when the museums aren’t that busy. Many museums are used to people coming in to draw, some even provide little stools for you to sit on when drawing, you just have to ask!
Alternative for home bodys: during the pandemic a lot of museums started offering virtual tours. Such as the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Rjiksmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City or the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
National Portrait Gallery: sketch of a painting by John Singer Sargent
left page: objects at the National Museum of Scotland, done in colored pencil
museum’s interiors can be fun too - at the Lucerne Museum of Transport
If you know my work, you might know that I love drawing my outfits. I like to remember what I was wearing on the day I made the sketch. But drawing other people’s clothes can be fun too! This is another one where you can go out to a busy spot and draw people in a cafe, on a street, in a park. But when I want to really focus on clothes, I find that there is a lot of good content online you can use as reference. I love the Watching New York instagram account, as well as these What are People Wearing in Paris Streetstyle Videos or even High Fashion Runways!
This is a very fool-proof method to finding ideas for sketching. There are a lot of good prompt lists out there, who give you color schemes or words to draw. I like the 100 Things I like to draw lists by Emily Thatcher or Jamie Green. You can also do such a list yourself! The 100 Things To Draw list idea (I think) was started by Jamie Green, you basically make a list of 100 things you like to draw and them draw them - it’s that simple. You can do one word a day, or just have the list ready for when you’re out of ideas.
There are also always fun drawing challenges going on, I’d say instagram is the best place to find those. A few ideas: Mermay (drawing a mermaid every day in may), Inktober (drawing every day during October, loads of lists for this one out there), Still Here Still Life (a new still life reference photo every week), Folktaleweek or Animal Adventures Week.
here you go - six ideas on how to fill your sketchbook. I hope I was able to help you out of a drawing slump, or maybe just inspire you to pick up your sketchbook this evening and do some doodling. Also, please let me know how you like to fill your sketchbooks, or if there are some things you can always go back to when you don’t know what to draw.
Lots of love,
Magali