Sketch Dump 3 - Characters + Lists

Put On Your Thinking Cap

When I started looking through my sketchbook for the last sketch dump, I was kind of shocked at just how much doodling and concept work I did. It reminded me of the time when my teacher forced us to fill sketchbooks every semester (I miss those days). There were so many concepts of the puppets and designs for my “Frame Of Mind” series that I was reminded of how ambitious the idea was for me at the time. I wanted the visuals to look really clean and I had just finished learning Toonboom, and wanted to put my knowledge to good use. Those were fun times. Anyway, as I finished photographing the last batch of sketches I came to a section of the sketchbook that had a lot of notes about how I wanted the puppets to work, and the list of assets I wanted to make for them.

So as I was putting together this blog, I thought it would be cool to show some of the “pre-prep” work I did in order to make the puppets functional. I also think it’s cool to show how sketchbooks aren’t just for sketching and in my case, they also function as a brain dump. I’m not as improvisational with my art. Mostly due to wanting things to look good, but also being aware of how long the process is. I’ve always hated getting far along in a project, and hating the results of what I was making and scrapping everything. It’s an important part of the creative process, sure, but I always believed if you could avoid it you should. Tear your ideas up when the stakes are low, so that when you do your work, you can focus on the joy of the process and not whether something will work out or not. It’s a messy process but my mind is messy and so following that, my sketchbook would be too. Such is life.

-Until next time-