A soft spot for messy sketchbooks

Inside: Prompts and a permission slip to play.

Back in 2020, I filled a Moleskine sketchbook from cover to cover in the space of a month. Sure, there wasn’t much else for me to be doing during that time, but I gave myself permission to just play.

Nothing was for show, for perfect, for an end result. I pasted in papers, experimented with supplies, and made marks that didn’t make sense.

It was so freeing and it’s still one of my favourites to look back on. Not because there are any masterpieces here, far from it. Rather, I remember how much fun it was to create without expectations. I was learning how my materials layered and mixed on the page.

This sketchbook holds my first steps into adding mark making into my art journals. Here are a few of the imperfect pages.

Consider this your permission slip to grab a blank journal that’s been gathering dust and see where the papers take you. I’ve signed it with my favourite Tombow Fudenosuke soft tip pen.

Prompts

Every fortnight I collect snippets, elements and colours for you to use in your creative practice. I invite you to take whatever sparks curiosity back to your journal and start making art.

Our theme for this edition is play.

“A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’” — Leo Tolstoy

“All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease.”

― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

• grids

• alphabet stamps

• zine

Create your own craft desk colour palette. Make a colour swatch page using only the papers/paints/pencils that are on your desk right now. What does it look like?

I hope you enjoy exploring these prompts and the theme of play in your art journaling (or any other creative project).