5 Reasons to keep a daily life sketchbook

Hello,
It has been approximately 2 weeks since I started my daily life sketchbook. Since then I have drawn in it everyday. I love it so much that I can see me doing this for many years to come.
I am so passionate about it, that I want everyone to keep one. I guarantee anyone who decides to keep a daily life sketchbook will be hooked! I'm positive... I really am.

So here for you, is my top 5 reasons for keeping a daily life sketchbook:

1. What is better, I ask you? Capturing your life in Art or Photographs? Just think of any favorite photo you have. A person, an event or object that you have, and now imagine if you had drawn it/painted it yourself? Now how would you feel about it?

2. It's simple- drawing and painting everyday makes you better at it. Think your not good at drawing? That's probably because you don't practice enough. It is like anything else, playing guitar, learning to read, riding a bike. Practise, practise, practise. I know I am not the best drawer, but I also know that in a year or two when I look back at my sketchbook,my art is going to look a lot different.

3. You will be capturing little parts of your day that you probably wouldn't remember in a years time. Not to mention next month, next week, or tomorrow.
In a daily life sketchbook you get to sketch anything you want. What you bought today, what you ate for breakfast, what's in your cupboard, your flowering garden, your favorite drink, a butterfly you found, your next door neighbours annoying cat... Anything to do with your everyday life.

4. You love art, and everyone wants to do their hobby everyday don't they?

5. What better gift to leave your loved ones when your gone. What an amazing insight they will have to the life that was you!
And it is this thought that keeps me going. I know one day my daughters and grandchildren will have something very unique and irreplaceable to always remember me by.





I hope I have convinced even just one more person to start a sketchbook and draw in it daily. Tomorrow I will be back with a list of my most favorite everyday life sketchbook keepers., to give you even a little more inspiration.

Thanks for visiting,

hugs

Sonya XX

Developing a character

This morning I woke with one task in mind. Developing a brand new original whimsical character for my next journal. If you have ever tried this before you would know how hard this is.
You have to think about face styles, body style, hair, choose from millions of types of lips and eyes and ears and noses and hands and feet and clothes...lalalalalalala
Oh my gosh.
Well how did I go about it all you may ask?
First I started with a little research on the ever so faithful google. I looked up favourite artists, downloaded other peoples cute drawings, looked in books and even resorted to looking at a few cloth dolls I have made.

I got them all together on the kitchen table and started looking at what I liked and disliked about each drawing I had gathered. I then tried to sketch all the things I liked into the one character. Sometimes this doesn't always work because they just don't match. For example you can't have a cute toddlers head on a long thin body etc.(Well you can if that's what your after, but I was not.)

With a lot of thinking and a bit of practice I did manage to come up with a new character that i feel fairly confident in capturing over and over within my journal pages. As this is the main thing to look at, you must be able to redraw that person in close likeness each time.

I found that I had a tendency to like certain features such as a flatter oval type head, long flowing hair covering one side of the face, lolly legs and a quite simple face with rosy cheeks.

Below you can see my sketch page surrounded by inspiration, with some practice sketches and in the middle of my sketch page is a little character that started developing.

At this stage I'm still not quite happy. She isn't quite my own yet. So I kept on. Here are some ore rough drawings.

it was at this point that I felt the nose and eyebrow were right and the little cheeks, but my character still needed some fine tuning. Kept on experimenting with hair and faces and her little body and clothing will develop later on. A lot of people name their character of course, now this is the super hard bit. I think as I develop a sound understanding of how she is drawn her name will just appear.

 Ill keep working on her tomorrow and show you the end result of my new character in my journal as soon as I'm finished altering her. She still needs a full body to work on and a clothing range. I want to try and keep it all as whimsical as I can. I think I need to also work on a mood board for her. Basically a mood board is her face done over and over with different expressions such as, happy, sad, angry, etc.

Well this sure has been fun. If you have developed your own little character I would love to see, so let me know!

Bye for now,

Sonya