Digital Sketchbooks
Digital Ink Drawings, Procreate 2025
Digital Paintings, HEAVYPAINT 2023
The joy of the sketchbook. Sketchbook goobers. Little goofy brainfarts.
Carry a sketchbook, artist! Pen and paper, mechanical pencil, bouncy inkbrush. Crayons if you must. Always have one on you, call it your journal, notebook, horcrux. Make it a part of you, put a piece of yourself into it.
We live in the cyberpunk future, the sketchbook can even be digital.
But what should be in it? Little drawings, quick sketches of cafe visits, compositions, notes, the phone number you scored against all odds (the sketchbook helped). And of course goobers, little sketchbook goobers. Dudes with swords and robots and orcs, the vomit of imagination we surround ourselves with daily, our joyful banal fantasy.
Dwarves!
There are even events for sketchbooks, chief among them inktober. Blessed inktober, it comes once a year every year, and every year I'm taken by surprise. Every year I think "this is the year I'm totally gonna do it" and every year I kinda sorta something maybe. (This year I'm totally gonna do it though.)
The biggest doodling event was school of course. In school the margins of notebooks were reserved for chemistry, math, grammar, and the pages were for the goobers. And anyway it's easier to listen to the teacher when drawing little fantasy dudes.
Doodling into the sketchbook is default process mode. Restful flow. Everything calms down to a pleasant hum.
Inktober goober
I keep an iPad as a sketchbook. The inky drawings are Procreate, the blocky paintings are HEAVYPAINT. Let me nerd out for a moment, bear with me!
HEAVYPAINT is a blessing, an aberration, made by artists for artists, slightly janky in the best kinda way. It feels like a portable gouache set. The brushes feel heavy, like the name implies, and it has my favourite tool in all of digital painting: the lasso fan brush. It’s magic: you simply make the outline of the shape and it fills it in. Painting with blobs.
What novelty! No longer imitating a bristled brush, no longer do you construct your shapes stroke on stroke. Simply lay down what shape you want. Become a sculptor of paint, carve shapes and color into each other, build up and cut away to make goobers with incredible efficiency.
The apps can also play back your making process at blazing fast speeds, a great party trick. Though nothing beats the physical sensation of pencil on paper, the grip and resistance and warm fizzle of graphite sanding onto paper. Ah!
You will of course need to have a cool bag to carry your cool sketchbook with you, it's a bag person life to live.
Anyway, sketch in a book! Goobers or whatevers, it’s good for heart and mind.
