Finding the beauty in the everyday sketch
I’ve always thought of my sketchbook pages as “not real art.” To me, they’ve been stepping stones, quick scribbles, and haphazard paintings on the way to something more polished and “worthy” of being shared as a final piece. I’d often flick through them and think, too silly, too rough, not quite good enough.
But my time as artist in residence at Poole Farm has changed that.
Over the past few months, countless visitors have sat down with my sketchbooks, slowly turning the pages, pausing to look closer. I’ve watched people smile at the sketches of ducks and trees, and seeing how much people have enjoyed looking through the pages has helped me reconsider my sketchbook practice. I love my sketchbook and its recording of my creative life, but I never share it. Perhaps I should, and that people actually want to see it!
It’s been unexpectedly moving to see my sketchbooks through their eyes. What I saw as imperfect or incomplete, others saw as full of life capturing a moment, a movement, or a mood that a “finished” piece might polish away.
That experience has made me reconsider what a sketchbook really is. Perhaps it’s not simply a private workspace for me the artist, but a living record of curiosity and connection, and a place where mistakes, experiments, and raw ideas can speak just as loudly as the final artwork.
With that in mind, I decided to gather my Poole Farm sketches into a zine a small, hand-made booklet so that others could take home a piece of that process. Inside are quick studies of hungry pigs, scribbly meadows and loose line drawings of the farm’s tree canopies. Each page feels like an honest snapshot of my time here.
You can find the zine (and maybe even see me drawing in my sketchbook) at Poole Farm’s Wild & Well event. I’ll also be bringing them to the next art fair, and I’ve just added the zines to my shop, which you can find here!
Through this process I invite you to consider whether you dismiss your own creative work as not good enough, and just maybe if you shared it with others, you might find it adds a little light and joy into the world. You might just find a drawing that makes you and others smile, proof that even the roughest sketch can hold a little magic, and that applies to your sketches too I promise.
