I recently learned of an annual 14 day event called Sketchbook Revival Binge Fest and wanted to share my experience. I heard of this event from frequent blog visitor Hanna and you can check out her blog here.
The event is hosted by Karen Abend and has the following objectives
- Have fun!
- Try new ideas that might not be in your comfort zone
- Develop a daily creative practice to help fill your sketchbook
Each day has a theme, and also provides a handful of instructional videos to help kickstart your exploration around that theme. You can always go rogue and create your own theme.
Day 1: Mindfulness
I didn’t watch any of the videos–I really didn’t know what to expect so I tried something that I thought would be consistent with the theme. Some of you might notice this as a Zentangle. I introduced these a few months ago.
Day 2: I don’t remember the theme, but this is what I did (you can see a different sketch ghosting through the paper. It looks kinda cool, but it’s not a part of the Challenge)
Day 3: Animals
I found some online clipart and copied them.
Day 4: Collage
I found some stickers and other stuff on my kitchen counter and made this
Day 5: Florals
I decided to watch one of the tutorial videos and the instructor was drawing flowers with watercolors, without sketching in pencil first. I decided to try it
Day 6: Portraits
I found this image on the internet and sketched it with my fountain pen
Day 7: What do I call this?
I did watch the tutorial on this, and really like the final product
Day 8: I don’t remember what this was called
I started with random squiggles and ended up with this. I hadn’t used colored pencils yet in this Sketchbook Challenge so gave them a try
Day 8A: Simple Watercolor Landscape
I followed along with the tutorial for this one
Day 9: Imaginary Scene
I mostly followed the tutorial, drawing a little village from imagination. I limited myself to 4 colors of markers. Yeah, some of the perspective is wonky, there’s an unclear division between sky and ground, and so forth. But it’s kinda cool.
Day 10: Careful observation
For this day’s theme you could choose either perspective lessons or careful observations lessons. I chose the careful observation. I forgot to carefully observe while drawing the woman’s right arm and that’s why it looks so out of place
Day 11: Visual Storytelling
Cartoonist Tom Hart provided a framework to develop a story line and sketches for a visual story (he prefers this term to cartoon). I never would have come up with this on my own.
Day 12: Ink or Paint Blobs
The idea here is to create some little ink or paint blogs, and then use this as a base to draw something. Kinda like an artistic Rorschach test.
Day 13: Automatic, or Free drawing
This is all about making random marks on a page, and just exploring. I used a brush pen for one drawing, and a woodless pencil for the other
Day 14: How to write the date
The instructor for this tutorial says that she comes up with a different format to write each day in her sketchbook. I try to do that too, and here’s what I came up with for Jun 9 after watching her tutorial. Yeah, I know. I put the wrong date down…..
