Let's Talk About Sketchbooks Volume 8

May 25, 2017 Haley Aubuchon

It has been so long since I've had a sketchbook to share.

I have really gotten away from art journaling in the past year when I started to work on loose sheets of paper or tearing out pages from my sketchbook to scan. This shift is mostly great because it means that I'm focusing more on making work that I can sell and developing my digital skills with scanned-in work. But I really miss making art that lives in a book and the more personal work that comes out when I'm art journaling is so valuable to me. I made a point of getting back into it in the last month or so and it has been great.

So here's the book. It's a Moleskine cahier that I started in August 2016. When I was almost finished I painted the cover white (covering up a pink paint job that I did not like, which you can kind of see showing through) and added this rad Nefertiti sticker from Salad Days Pins.

I started this book as a place to use up extra acrylic paint but dropped that plan almost immediately when I decided to use it as an art journal instead. These first two pages reflect that original purpose, plus some extra doodling.

The pages in this book are actually very thin, so in many places I stuck pages together or added mixed media paper on top of the page to give it some more heft. The drawing on the left (of Joan of Arc, naturally) is on mixed media paper that I glued into the book.

Because I was working on so many projects on loose paper I tried to use the book as a place to keep some samples of what I was working on at the time. The painting on the left is one of a series of watercolors that I pasted in. The page on the right is heavily inspired by Katie Licht's Cut and Paste class at Studio Calico, which I was taking at the time. I am such a fan of Katie's work, so getting to learn about her process was amazing.

This is a completely unfinished page. I tried out a few ideas and didn't feel the need to continue with either of them, so I just left them that way.

On the left is another Cut and Paste inspired page, using papers that I painted. On the right is another collage using paper that I drew patterns on myself (the eyes are a rubber stamp that I carved years ago - you can see it in use in a different journal here).

More Cut and Paste inspired pages, this time with a more minimal approach.

I had intended on journaling on this whole spread, but I never did. Now, I like it the way it is.

I liked the way that these 3 pages worked as a spread. I cut holes into the blue page on the right so that the polka dots on the page behind it show through.

More collages, using papers that I painted myself. This blue, green, and yellow color scheme is different for me, but I love how it looks.

More examples of what I was working on. I was scraping layers of paint onto paper using a credit card, and then painting over it so that the layers show through in the negaative space.

More collages that didn't work out so well and a pattern that I love in pink.

More examples of current work that I glued in. This was an early study for what would become a series of abstract watercolors that are now in my shop.

One of the drawings from my Draw a Lady Daily project. I did most of them in other notebooks, but one day this was the only one I had with me. When I closed the book, some of the paint marker rubbed off on the opposite page, so I covered it with a pattern.

Trying to get back to journaling like I used to, with lots of bold lettering. And another scraped paint background on the right.

I have loved incorporating photos into my journals and doodling on them. What I tried on this photo turned out looking more like stink lines though. The stickers say "blurry & happy" because that's what I am in this photo. I'm trying to remember that I can be happy even when things are blurry.

Practicing mixing acrylic colors. And some minimalist collage.

More color mixing practice, paint pen doodling, and the Mary Oliver quote that I want everywhere.

The evolution of a pattern. I doodled the big eye when I didn't know what to draw and then decided to make it into a pattern.

More paint pen patterns.

Thanks for checking out my sketchbook! If you share your sketchbook or art journal on your blog or Instagram or wherever, let me know, I love peeking inside other people's sketchbooks. Hopefully it won't be so long before I have another sketchbook to post.

Draw A Lady Daily

April 13, 2017 Haley Aubuchon

Even though I'm already in the midst of another daily project, I thought I would do a little wrap-up post about my March project, Draw A Lady Daily. The concept was very simple - I planned to draw a lady every day during the month of March as a way to celebrate women's history month and to practice drawing people - something that I tend to shy away from a little bit.

I didn't actually end up drawing a lady every single day in March - I missed quite a few. But I did draw a large number of ladies, came up with some new ideas, and had a lot of fun, so I consider it a smashing success. As I mentioned in my 100 day project post, I don't feel like I need to prove anything or develop a habit regarding making art every day, so I didn't beat myself up about it too much when I missed a day here or there.

When I was traveling during part of the month, I brought a pack of Posca paint markers with me and did some quick - single color drawings of different ladies from history. I tried to include some women that might be new to some people (and were new to me) across a wide variety of fields and disciplines. And when they ended up forming a rainbow I wasn't mad about it.

In March I also learned to make gifs, for an unrelated project, so when I laid some photos of my abstract paintings over my lady drawings and couldn't decide which version to use, I knew what to do.

I applied the same overlay technique to some lady drawings using flower photos. California is experiencing a superbloom and I had plenty of photos to choose from, both new and old. Quite a few people liked these drawings, so I listed an option for a custom floral drawing in my Etsy shop.

One of the best parts of this challenge was that other people participated! Brandi Kincaid, my wonderful friend, who is also a spectacular artist, joined in and a few other people played along as well. It was so fun to work on this challenge with others, and I'd love to do it again with a group like this. To see all of our ladies from throughout the month, check out the #drawaladydaily hashtag on Instagram.

I had a wonderful time drawing ladies in March, and I hope that other people had fun following along. I'm hoping to make a zine featuring some of my lady drawings from March and some new ones sometime in the nearish future. Adding it to my ever-growing list of projects that I'll get to eventually. Onto the next one!

100 Days of Unsolicited Illustrations

April 4, 2017 Haley Aubuchon

I wasn't going to participate in the 100 Day Project this year. I have plenty of other projects that I want to work on and after completing the project last year and a 365 day project in 2015, I didn't feel like I needed to do it again. But then I saw other people getting excited about it, I listened to an episode of Elise Gets Crafty about the project, and I saw more people get excited about it and I was really tempted.

So I decided to go for it. And then I thought a lot about what I wanted my project to be. Having participated in challenges like this in the past, I know how much work they are. If you've never done one before - it is a lot work more than you think. You need to come up with an idea (almost always the hardest part), execute the idea (which for me usually means trying out a few things until I do something I actually like), and share it online. And repeat. Every single day. In 100 days there are many when I'm really busy or have a migraine or am just not feeling inspired, so I was tempted to come up with a project that would be easy for me to do complete on days like that. But I didn't feel 100% positive about that plan. I feel like I'm at a point where I want and need to push myself to work harder to get to develop my illustration skills, so I came up with a new, ambitious, scary project and decided to go for it (with the help of many people on Instagram who encouraged me to when I was whining about it).

So here it is: I'm going to do 100 days of Unsolicited Illustrations. Unsolicited, because no one asked me to do them. I'm going to assign them to myself. (Of course, you can always hire me to do a solicited illustration if you'd like). Some ideas of things I might illustrate are scenes from literature, illustrations for articles, things from my imagination, alternate covers for books, maybe a funny tweet or two.

With this project, I want to practice interpreting something that isn't necessarily visual (a book, an article, a poem, a song, a scene) and translating it into an illustration. I also want to focus on making finished, polished illustrations that I'm proud of. I want them to be detailed and complete, with lots of color and texture and nice backgrounds (which I rarely bother with). Pretty much the opposite of the "just get something, anything, down on paper and in a photo" strategy that I occasionally take with daily projects.

This is a big undertaking and I'm pretty scared about it. For me illustrations involve a lot of steps (coming up with an idea, sketching, drawing, coloring, scanning, editing, etc.) and they ALWAYS take longer than I anticipate. So, I'm trying to be very relaxed about this project. I'd love for 100 illustrations to come out of it, but I'm not going to beat myself up if that happens. Some days, success with this project might just mean working on it. I'm trying to remember that I don't have anything to prove and that whatever I get done is better than nothing. This is really hard for someone like me who is very motivated by checking off boxes and such. Relaxed is not something I usually (ever) am. Maybe that's the real goal of this 100 day project.

To try and help myself succeed, I'm planning on working up a long list of illustration ideas, since ideas are a large part of the battle here. If you'd like to send me some illustration ideas, please do. I'm also planning on trying to utilize my mornings for this project. I'm an early riser but I rarely actually do creative things right when I wake up. I usually spend my mornings by reading or watching YouTube and procrastinate on daily projects until the evening, which is always a mistake because I'm not at my best creatively after 4 PM and everything takes me way longer than it should. So I'm going to try and devote mornings to this project, when hopefully I will be more productive. Otherwise, I'm not really planning anything, just jumping in with both feet and seeing what happens. You can see what happened with Day 1 above.

Are you doing the 100 Day Project? If you are then let me know, It is always so cool to see the wide variety of unique projects people are taking on and I'd love to follow along with yours!

From Inspiration to Pattern (and Feminism)

September 28, 2016 Haley Aubuchon

In case you hadn't noticed, I've been making a lot of patterns lately. I've been participating in Anika Starmer's #BacktoPattern challenge and am just loving patterns in general. I plan on doing a separate post about my process for making patterns, but I wanted to share a little bit more in detail about the inspiration and meaning behind this pattern in particular.

I forgot to take a photo of the book before returning it to the library, so enjoy this Google image.

I recently read The Lie Tree by Fances Hardinge, which is a historical fiction novel about Faith, a 14 year-old girl in the late 1860s who wants to be a natural scientist. At the time science was not a career option for women and Faith is explicitly and implicitly told that she will never be a scientist, and that her interest in science is strange, laughable, and unseemly. She has to work to suppress her interests and pretend not to care.

Faith struggles with feelings of frustration, desperation, self-hatred because of her intellect and curiosity. She is made to think that there is something wrong with her, or evil about her because she is interested in science. Reading from Faith's point-of-view made me think about how we celebrate women in history who have been able to transcend these restrictions and do great things (which is incredibly important), but that there are so many more women whose potential was quashed, who were told that their brains were too small to follow their passion and weren't able to do anything about it. And it made me think about how even since Faith's time, women have continued to face this type of uphill battle as they are barred, discouraged, and turned away from their areas of interest in overt and subtle ways.

I was thinking about all of this when I read this passage in the book (after the men and women have separated for after-dinner socializing)

"Likewise, here in the drawing room, each lady quietly relaxed and became more real, expanding into the space left by men. Without visibly changing, they unfolded, like flowers, or knives."

I absolutely loved the image conjured by that passage. The idea of women being given the chance to expand as they wished. Comparing 1860s ladies to knives and switchblades. Flowers. And the idea for this pattern came into my head pretty much fully formed. Flowers and switchblades together, both in various stages of unfolding. Thin red linework on a pink background. I could pretty much see it all in my head, which doesn't happen to me often. Usually, I have a general idea for a pattern, but it becomes much clearer and more developed as I work on it. I usually play around with the colors quite a bit, but I knew exactly what I wanted for this pattern.

I immediately started drawing switchblades and peonies in various stages of "unfolidng." I chose peonies as the flowers in the design after some research because they looked closed to what I envisioned and they unfold in the way that I was thinking of. There are 7 switchblades and dozens of different peonies in this pattern so it took quite a while. One change that I did make from my original vision was to eliminate the extra leaves and vines that I thought to include. You can see the sketches of them here.

One of my favorite elements in the pattern

Then I scanned in all of the sketched images and digitally put the peony and switchblade elements together into individual pieces.

Then I put the individual pieces together into the final pattern. All of the digital work took about a day, but I was just so excited to be working on this pattern.

So there you have it, the finished product. It has a lot of meaning for me, about women being strong and sharp and beautiful and soft. About being all of those things out of necessity and desire. For women who didn't get to do what they would have loved and been good at.

I feel like this idea can be developed so much further, but I'm pretty head over heels for this pattern right now. This pattern is available on prints, pouches, mugs, and other products in my Society 6 store if you are too.

Thanks for taking the time to check out my thoughts on this print. It means a lot to me! And if this has interested you at all, definitely check out T he Lie Tree, there are a lot of feminist themes, a pretty interesting mystery, and obviously some beautiful writing going on there.

Let's Talk About Sketchbooks Volume 5

May 30, 2016 Haley Aubuchon

This week's sketchbook is actually one that is still in use (kind of). I got this book just under a year ago on a trip back to Massachusetts. I was in a little bit of a journal slump (I had started my 2015 daily drawing project and was spending most of my art time working on those drawings, first on white loose-leaf paper and then in a 100% boring sketchbook (not included in this series because all of the drawings in it are already on my Instagram page as part of that project)). After I finished my last journal I didn't pick up a new one for a while.

Then, I saw this journal in Paper Source and it was love at first sight. I loved the exposed binding and the pages of color swatches at the start and end of the book. I loved how chunky it was. I loved the green cover, even though green isn't usually my jam. So, I bought it and started dreaming about how quickly I was going to fill it up with tons of drawings and artwork. Almost a year later I still haven't filled it up, but this journal contains some of my favorite work (I think I say that about all of them) and got me out of a journal-keeping slump, so I think it did it's job.

This journal is made by Plum Goods and has a really cool exposed coptic binding made with pink thread that I am super into (although paint does leak into the binding). I customized the cover very simply by taping down a cut-out of my name and by letting it get super beat up.

This journal was designed by Linda Geary who did a project with a bunch of color swatches, which are featured at the front and back of the book. They would probably make really cool backgrounds for pages, but I just let them sandwich my own artwork and serve as inspiration.

The first page references the fact that I had gone for a while without an art journal to dump my thoughts/feelings/artwork into. The idea that journals make me feel better that I keep coming back to.

I started incorporating my daily drawings into the journal, instead of making them as their own separate project. I drew the anatomical heart out of a book about cardiovascular health that I found at my grandparents' house, photographed it for my project, and then added the writing later.

On the left I painted over a random pen drawing that I didn't like. I won a zine from Natalie Mutrux and in my package she included an envelope of ephemera. I made a contour portrait of the guy in the bottom photo and the photo in beside it on the right page. That black watercolor rubs off onto the facing page when the journal is closed. I try not to let it bother me.

I took myself out on a self-love date and went clothes shopping, to the art supply store, the book store and to sit and draw in coffee shops (where a lot of the drawings on the surrounding pages were made). Over the next few days I drew the things I bought for my daily drawings, including a bunch of Dr. P H Martin's watercolors, which I swatched on the paint bottle drawings.

More playing around with new watercolors.

As you can probably tell from the previous pages, I was doing a lot of life drawing at the time, hugely inspired by Danny Gregory. I bought all of his books that I could find right away and this was a favorite quote from The Creative License, painted with watercolor onto vellum and then pasted into the journal.

I took a bunch of notes while reading Amy Poheler's Yes Please and taped them in waterfall-style.

I think this was from a podcast? I should have written down my source, but I think I heard it when I was walking home and it just stuck in my head. Also, that pink is watercolor bleed-through from the previous page and it is so good.

Ugly and unfinished pages are all over this journal.

Playing with stamps when I couldn't sleep (because of the coffee). Stamps are by Kelly Purkey.

Another example of incorporating my daily drawings into the journal. I drew the tiger and painted it teal and added the speech bubble with song lyrics later (lyrics are to Nanny Nanny Boo Boo by Le Tigre, obvs).

I went through an animals phase with my daily drawings and this is one of my favorites.

In my last sketchbook post I wrote about covering up artwork I didn't like with lettering. It also works for angsty journaling too!

I fell in love with blind contour self portraits while working in this journal.

I always felt like the space to the side of that lamp would be an excellent place to put something, but I never did...

When working with liquid watercolor I will sometimes use wax paper taped to cardboard as an impromptu palette (I know, I'm so professional). I love the way the wax paper looks after it has been used a few times, so I will often tape it into my journal (and, of course, more blind contours).

A lot of pages include my daily drawings and nothing else - also I worked on these pages completely out of order - the one on the right is from late June when I was preparing to move apartments, and the one on the left is from mid-July.

Lipstick swatches, because why not.

I really like the look of this page.

Travel journaling! This is from a trip to Montreal with a million delays. I don't really like the look of this at all, buy I collected a bunch of business cards and stuck them in and it was fun.

Mopping up excess paint.

Playing with patterns. Absolutely love the way this one looks with the pink thread used for the binding.

Even though I always intend to keep them art-y I always end up jotting down random things like packing lists in my journal - this one is for Portland!

Of course, the journal then came with me to Portland. I'm really into those polka dot letters.

Again, a lot of the pages in this journal have random one-off drawings in them. If I don't particularly like them or want to build a page around them I will just write directly over them. It adds visual interest to a page with a floating drawing and gives me an spot to write stuff down (mostly just venting that I don't worry about being super legible).

Playing with drawing and watercolors on vellum. I painted the title of this piece - the moon-faced girl on the page behind the transparent vellum. Doesn't she look like those old depictions of the man-in-the-moon?

I still have quite a few pages left in this sketchbook (you can kind of see the block that is not as wrinkly/colorful in the above photo), but my work on it has kind of slowed. When I started working in this book I was really excited about how chunky it is and had grand plans to finish it as quickly as possible. Over a year later that has definitely not happened, and I'm less motivated to pull it out because I feel like the body of work inside isn't as reflective of where I am now. I'm not sure if I'll finish it off someday or just call it done. I guess that means I'm it is still in progress...