Back in college, I kept a sketchbook for one of my painting classes. My professor was adamant that we worked in our sketchbooks on a weekly basis (at least). As a result, I sometimes added quick doodles when I wanted to get these sketches “out of the way.” Sometimes I surprised myself with how my quick drawings turned out. Perhaps I should take up sketching again? I think it’s a pretty great way to brainstorm creative ideas.
I was looking through a few old sketches I made back in college, and came across this self portrait. It made me realize that over the past few years, I’ve had a tendency to focus a little too much on collage. I think I’d really enjoy revisiting some of these other mediums that I used to work in. Perhaps I should start a new color pencil sketch series? We shall see…if anything, it’s been great getting inspired by artwork from my past. I’m looking forward to changing things up again in the future.
Back in college I kept a few sketchbooks where I’d work on studies of various subjects. This color pencil drawing is from one of those sketchbooks, when I was studying different expressions for my upcoming series of collage portraits for my senior thesis. I was also playing around with different color schemes, which is why this is done with cool colors.
The other day, I mentioned that I was going through old sketchbooks. This is actually another one of the drawings I came across – it’s a self portrait that I made with color pencil.
I’m realizing I really need to revisit other mediums and play around with them. These older drawings of mine are inspiring me to start changing things up a bit. As much as I enjoy making collages, I’m gearing up to start having my variety in my artistic life.
The other day I was going through old sketchbooks that were in my closet, trying to figure out what to get rid of. Most of the pages were full of notes, jotted down back when I was in college. However, on some pages I found a few drawings, so I removed the pages that had drawings and threw out the rest of those books.
This is one of the drawings I came across – it’s actually a self portrait. Self portraits have always been a bit of a struggle for me – it’s really difficult to depict yourself. So whenever someone says one of my self portraits doesn’t look like me, I like to say it isn’t supposed to. It just represents a version of me.