The Sketchbook Project

with The Brooklyn Art Library

I stumbled across the Sketchbook Project on Instagram one day, and immediately felt the need to participate in the movement. The Sketchbook Project is hosted by The Brooklyn Art Library and their mission is to create a global time capsule to help articulate our collective creative thoughts. And people are doing it! Hundreds of thousands from over 100 countries. You pay to participate, and they send you a blank journal with very little rules and a deadline to send it back to be part of the library. This is how I spent my quarantine.

I struggled back and forth with what to fill my sketchbook with, because you can literally do anything you want. I thought about painting in it, I thought about writing a story (probably best I didn’t), but when I was brainstorming what to do, I had recently discovered the art of collage. And I felt this could be my playground for new medium. It would let me try new things, create new content, and be authentic.

I collected all the catalogs and design magazines I had lying around, ripped out pages with colors or patterns that intrigued me, got some scissors and glue and went to town. Every day I sat down to a blank page in the journal, a gathering of paper scraps that had some meaning to me at the moment and freely glued one thing on top of the other. I included other mediums too like paint, pastels, and pencil to enhance the movement, texture, or color. I definitely have some favorites (captured below), and some others that I look at and wonder what the heck I was thinking in the moment.

I hope that someone one day will stumble across this collection of collages in the library and it will inspire them to do something creative or to encourage them to pause and find the subtle connections in each piece.

xo - LB