Expressive Sketchbooks: Developing Creative Skills, Courage, and Confidence

by Helen Wells

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631598357
Publisher:	Quarry Books
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	436,821
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 10.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Helen Wells is an artist from the South Coast of England. Her artworks are intricate and organic and depict illusionary surfaces or landscapes. With multiple layers, fragments, colors, and obsessive decorative details, her ethereal patterned works bring to mind elements of the natural world or magical other-worlds.

Her artworks are in private collections all over the world and have featured on numerous products, from book covers to wine bottles. In 2014, she co-won Winsor & Newton’s Watercolor Revolution competition which resulted in her painting being displayed in the Saatchi Gallery in London. She has also been featured in magazines and exhibited her work at one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants in London.

She became an artist later in life after working in an office job for many years. She credits her use of sketchbooks with her finding her artistic style and the courage to develop her art outside of their pages. She is passionate about sketchbooks as a tool for self-discovery, play, and creativity, and is keen to share everything she has learned along the way.

For more information, visit Helen online:
helenwellsartist.com
instagram.com/helenwellsart
pinterest.co.uk/helenwellsartist

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: What Is an Expressive Sketchbook?
CHAPTER 1: MAGIC AND MOTIVATION
CHAPTER 2: GETTING GOING
CHAPTER 3: TECHNIQUES FOR EXPLORING AND EXPERIMENTING
CHAPTER 4: GROWING YOUR IDEAS
CHAPTER 5: PRACTICE AND PROGRESS
Acknowledgments
About the Author
 

Editorial Reviews

"An especially useful, thoroughly art student friendly, and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, art school, community libraries."—Midwest Book Review

From the Publisher

05/22/2020

Artists are harsh self-critics. Creative outcomes do not always meet expectations, and it can be difficult seeing one's work with an unbiased eye. In her book, professional artist Wells emphasizes the importance of keeping a sketchbook to help with the creative process and mitigate blocks that can slow it down. She presents various techniques and ideas for learning new approaches to allowing thoughts to flow freely and randomly. Each page is filled with beautiful illustrations of Wells's own sketchbook art, as well as exercises to help develop one's creative skills. Most artists will utilize sketchbooks to work out and expand on ideas before the final rendition of a complete work of art, be it illustration, painting, or sculpture. VERDICT Wells intends to help artists develop a means of inner and outer exploration of the creative journey by utilizing an expressive sketchbook as a form of journaling. Amateur artists especially may find this guide helpful.—Sandra Knowles, formerly South Carolina State Lib., Columbia

Library Journal