Expressive Sketchbooks: Developing Creative Skills, Courage, and Confidence

by Helen Wells

Expressive Sketchbooks shares a host of creative ideas and prompts, tools and techniques, methods for working around obstacles and barriers, and tons of visual inspiration to help you grow in your sketchbooking practice.

An expressive sketchbook is a place for you to explore, express, and enjoy your own innate creativity on your own terms. It is a safe playground for the imagination-a place to mess about, play, and experiment-and to gain confidence in your abilities as you develop your skills.

Expressive Sketchbooks offers techniques and creative exercises that incorporate mark making, watercolor, mixed media, collage, words and text, and more. It unpacks some of the obstacles and barriers that you may face along the way and offers wisdom and encouragement to help you decide why and how to start your sketchbook and how to develop and expand your artistic practice.

This book is packed with ideas and exercises, including:

• Exploratory drawing exercises
• How to utilize color in your sketchbook
• How to create dynamic and varied sketchbook pages
• How to find inspiration in nature and in your everyday life
• Ways to mix media and art supplies
• Ways to kickstart your creativity
• How to find and develop a process that feels personal to you

Through this book, you'll find out what lights you up, what makes you curious and fascinated, and what makes you expansive. Discover how to magnify your creativity and enliven your art skills by using an expressive sketchbook as your daily companion.

• ISBN13: 9781631598357
• Publish Date: 14 April 2020
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Quarry Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 144
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Expressive Sketchbooks is a tutorial and technique guide for developing artistic skills and confidence by Helen Wells. Released 14th April 2020 by Quarto on their Quarry imprint, it's 144 pages and available in paperback and ebook formats.

I enjoy writing and journaling. I like putting into words what I've been experiencing and processing in my day-to-day existence. I am a huge list-maker and find that for me, prioritizing different goals and dividing large projects into smaller tasks increases my productivity greatly. On the other hand, probably half of the gorgeous notebooks, sketchbooks, journals, and other paper books I bought with the best intentions sit still wrapped in plastic, unused, in my bookshelves. I am intimidated and sad/frustrated by my 'lack' of artistic talent. That's where this book helps.

The author has an accessible and encouraging style of instruction. It's a restful book to read and quite appealing graphically. Through guided instruction, she provides help with motivation, getting over starting difficulties, actual artistic techniques, finding inspiration, choosing subjects, and more practical lessons for getting over the intimidation of the blank page staring at you. (This was the most valuable takeaway for me personally).

This is a good book for bullet journals, sketchbooks, art diaries, building up a sketchbook library, art practice, mindfulness, etc.

I really loved the author/artist's wise words and advice about self kindness and avoiding being cruel with ourselves with regard to assessment.

Four stars. Lots of useful advice and accessible information.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.