Maybe Get Sketchier

Posted On April 12, 2022

An Illustrated Life, artist/author Danny Gregory’s collection of sketchbook-makers talking sketchbook-making, convinced me I could draw! Though the jury’s still out on whether that’s a good thing, the book serves up heaps of creative inspiration.

Heaps! An Illustrated Life abounds in wondrous and wacky drawings, watercolors and collages, accompanied by disarming personal (and perfectly concise) sketchbook-maker accounts of their individual and often idiosyncratic sketchbook-making habits. The art is singular and sublime, and all made by people who consider sketching the world around them (or the one in their heads) essential to living.

I love the way I see the world differently since I started drawing. I like seeing how everything relates to everything else.

Gay Kraeger

Or if not essential, damn important. Many of the sketchers find the act soothing, meditative even, and appreciate the relaxing somatic effects it engenders. For them, stopping to sketch slows down and focuses the mind. Others like the way sketching forces them to look more closely at the world, helps them see and appreciate it more deeply. More than one of the sketchbookers appreciated the connection to their subjects, regardless of whether or not they knew them or would ever even see them again.

That the sketchbooker’s styles and abilities run the gamut is beside the point: Sketchbooks are almost by definition deeply personal and mostly for private consumption. It’s not about technical drawing skills. It’s about one’s own way of seeing, and capturing that.

My journals give me a pressure-free place to play around.

Amanda Kavanagh

Naturally, there’s a good amount of gear talk. And it’s a gas nerding out to pen-make fanatics and ink-source obsessives. Learning the quirky preferences or secret “weapons” of so many artists is terribly instructive and worth the price of the book alone.

As might be expected, the sketchbooks themselves come up for discussion. Exact sketchbook brands or sizes. Home-bound or store-bought. Those with the perfect paper for water coloring, say, or for gluing the odd found object to. Then there are the stories of shelves of ragtag sketchbook reaching back decades, often bearing forgotten and surprisingly good drawings and ideas. Sketchbook collections are typically deep repositories of memories.

One other incredibly welcome aspect of An Illustrated Life is that, while many of its featured artists are seriously accomplished — luminaries like Chris Ware, R. Crumb and Cathy Johnson —they are, almost to a person, humble and unpretentious in sharing their preoccupations with creating bookfulls of “work” meant only for themselves. Between their encouraging words and glorious works, you may just be inspired to get sketchy, too.

An Illustrated Life
by Danny Gregory