Last week: Teaching pages

February 25, 2019 | 6 Comments

Last week was very hectic for me but I have more pages than normal to share with you. That’s because I used my everyday sketchbook during a two-day workshop which I taught on Thursday and Friday. I normally do these pages in a separate teaching book (a larger spiral bound Alpha), but I wanted to lighten my load and only carry one book, so I just used my current sketchbook.

It’s interesting to see that my sketching buddy, Suhita Shirodkar is loving doing her workshop planning in her everyday sketchbook, and is creating some wonderful pages doing this. I have never thought to do that as I normally do my workshop prep inside my Bullet Journal and/or a dedicated teaching book. I feel that my sketchbook is for documenting what actually happens, rather than planning things in the future. So I add comments about what happened during the sessions and these notes are very useful when I teach the workshop again.

Putting my teaching pages in my everyday day book is a risk as I often end up with messy pages – scribbled thumbnails, mixing swatches or half-completed demos which I do while talking to workshop participants. So it was a fun compositional challenge to make these pages look ‘nice’.

Apart from the two workshop days, I worked at a crazy pace on Monday and Wednesday (so no sketching outside my morning cafe visit) but on Tuesday had an afternoon outing – catching up with a sketching friend who was in Sydney for the day.

Here are my pages:


In regard to the workshop…

I will write a full report later, but you might be able to get a feel for what we did over the two days from these pages as they are. Some of the concepts I will be teaching in my next online course coming out later in the year.

It was a fantastic workshop with a great bunch of sketchers (only 2 out of the 12 were from Sydney!) The weather was patchy with rain affecting my plans but, as always, it worked out okay in the end. Thanks to everyone who attended – and also everyone on the waiting list. I hope to do another similar workshop (or two) later in the year. Make sure you are on my monthly newsletter list if you are interested in local workshops.


So do you use your sketchbook for planning and/or messy note taking? Or is it just for dedicated sketching?


 

6 Comments

  • Moony says:

    Daer Liz,

    I have parallel to my sketchbook a sketch- and notebook. It is smaller (DIN 5) an have blank pages and lines. So I can combine sketches and notes.

    I have a little question to another topic:

    Do you organize a oneweek100people challenge this year? I loved to participate the challenge the last years.

    Thx

    Moony

  • I’ve always used my sketchbook for sketches only and a journal for writing even writing about sketching and stuff related to sketching.

    Serendipity! Just this morning I decided that I’ll use my sketchbook not only for daily sketches, which I share on Instagram but also as a journal to record my thoughts, feelings and experiments. I am on a new path now where I will keep everything about my sketching adventure/journey in one place.

  • Carmel Campbell says:

    Thank you so much for a wonderful workshop. Only this morning I have been playing around with paint and shapes in my sketchbook. Not something I usually do. However I will journal next to the blotches. One of my takeaways from the workshop is to stop cleaning my palette!

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