Keeping a Sketchbook

During our lesson regarding the importance and specifics within keeping a sketchbook, we discussed artist Derek Jarman’s sketchbooks and what is successful about them. I was initially attracted to his method of documenting imagery, ideas and his thought process as it was close to mine. Through the use of his pages I can tell that he doesn’t waste time considering the aesthetics of the page of the layout of images in order to look attractive but more so to lay out his ideas clearly. The combination of pages with only imagery in contrast to pages with just text; either note taking or found text explain the diversity in sources that are needed to gain a successful amount of research for projects. Visually, I found his style of working admirable as his works seems more like a scrapbook; there are a combination of things on the pages: flyers, text, found imagery, own imagery, notes, scribbles and annotations which inspire me to apply all of these to my own work through my own voice in my sketchbook as it’s more interesting than using images found from the internet.

Following on from this, I began to place flyers and notes from exhibitions into my work in a method that was inspired by Jarman’s sketchbooks which is something I hadn’t been taught to do before. Previously I was told to focus more on what the page in a sketchbook was trying to communicate to someone looking at it, however after looking at sketchbooks like Jarman’s, I realised it’s more bout my own voice and what I’m trying to communicate myself to bring my ideas forward which made me glad that we looked at a variety of sketchbooks in this lesson. The focus of this lesson was to prove that our sketchbooks were an individual exploration into our fashion artefacts, mine being ‘red trainers’