Hello! It’s already February and I’m clearly easing very slowly back into my regular posting on this blog. Truthfully, it feels good. I have no regrets for taking January sweet and slow. But! I have begun to feel that familiar tingle at my fingertips to make new work! While the tingle is there, the specific idea isn’t jumping out to me, so today I’m diving into some older (and more recent) sketchbooks to help guide me. I rely on this method often, and it is always a solid reminder that sketchbooks are invaluable to the image-maker, no matter how mundane it may feel while creating them. Having a record going back years allows me to see the repeated imagery that shows up, clearly knocking around in my brain, asking to be further explored.

A stack of sketchbooks from the last 4 years or so.

I tend to choose multi-media sketchbooks so I can easily work with paint, pencil, pen or whatever else is calling my name. I like the canson multi-media from Blick or this one from Bee Paper, but really anything in the ~90lb paper weight range will do. I try not to be too precious with my sketchbooks. Sometimes I’ll have page upon page of illegible scribbling, other times I’ll make something that feels like finished work. Trying to sort and organize at the sketchbook level is impossible — it’s the free-association and non-judgemental open-endedness that make them such an honest record of my thought process.

As I flipped through sketches from the past few years, I found lists I had made of things I like to draw — little reminders of what was of particular interest to me at the time. The one above reads: “miniature things, empathy, magical realism, trees, girls w/ wild hair, frolicking, giant kind monsters, wonder, books, cozy” and then a phrase to the left: “inverting the expected.” Another list from a few months later reads: “strange beings, nature, round bodies, wild hair.” I can confirm that I am still obsessed with drawing all of these things, and it’s validating to recognize these through-lines in my visual interests. It’s important to have a recognizable visual voice as a professional illustrator, and I’ve found that it takes a lot of drawing for me to start to notice what I’m really interested in — it’s from there that the visual voice emerges.

After looking through sketchbooks and marking pages that stood out to me here and there, an idea for a new illustration started forming in my head. The idea-generating process was already working!! Something that is currently missing from my children’s illustration portfolio are animal characters. They’re just not something I tend to draw as often — I always gravitate towards humans. For a while now I’ve been wanting to make some images combining human and animal characters. Here are some pages with animals from various sketchbooks:

Some of the drawings lean towards the sweet/cute, and some lean towards the mythological or surreal. It’s a whole spectrum! We artists contain multitudes!! I find that lately I want my finished work to feel more strange/surreal (the cuteness will always be there, it’s just who I am and how I draw, I’ve accepted it). Keeping this in mind, I collected a few of the weirder creatures for reference too:

Here are a few more sketchbook pages that were inspiring me: I love doing this color blob exercise where you then turn them into faces! And a couple pages of cute people I’ve seen around our neighborhood (just for the record, I probably wouldn’t put strippers in a children’s illustration, but I passed them hanging outside their club when I was picking up our favorite Chinese food one night and I rushed home to draw them — I just loved their poses). And lastly, I really like the dinner party sketch; it may just become it’s own finished illustration.

So at this point I was thinking: maybe I can create a fun, busy scene (something à la Richard Scary) with lots of characters, human, animal, and invented! Perhaps a street scene in a town where everyone is just going about their day, or a classroom scene. Then I remembered this old illustration sketch I made back in 2021 of children putting on a play. I liked it when I first drew it, but something about it hadn’t quite held my interest and I forgot about it. When I look at it now, I can see why: it’s a bit boring and expected. It needs some critters! And maybe a little help with the composition.

And here is where it all came together: I would combine the idea of a stage production scene with animal and/or mystical characters. Since I don’t often include animal and human characters together in a scene, it took me a minute to get a feel for the characters:

And finally, here’s the sketch I ended up with. It’s the beginning of an idea, and will probably shift once I take it to final illustration, but I’m happy with it:

And there you have it! An example of how digging into old sketchbooks can yield fresh and exciting visual ideas. I can’t vouch for sketchbooking enough. There were many years where I never kept a regular sketchbook, and it pains me to think of all the ideas that just floated off into the ether and were never recorded!

I’ll be back soon with another post about the process of bringing this new sketch to a final illustration. Bye for now.

- Chamisa

Mining Old Sketchbooks for New Ideas

Creating Art from Pain and Loss