How to organise inspiration in Sketchbooks and dummies – Organising inspiration

I have a confession to make. I have too many sketchbooks and dummies and I keep buying more. I know, I know. I don’t need more and honestly I might not have to buy one ever again, but I just love them all so much.

An empty sketchbook is a sketchbook full of promises of great works and ideas I’m going to create. An empty dummy is just a place where I’m going to store so many inspirations and beautiful things.

When I talked about them in my 6 ways to organize inspiration post I realized that I never could explain my system for those in 1 blog post. So I decided to make another one to fully explain my system with dummies and sketchbooks.

As I explained in my 6 ways to organize inspiration, I do have a system and use almost all my sketchbooks. If you want to know how to organise your inspiration and idea’s do head over to that one.

How to organise all inspiration in sketchbooks and dummies // capture all your ideas in a system of drawings

My sketch sketchbook

I love this one. It’s the one where I make most of my pencil drawings and practise my figure drawing. I also have an old version of this which is slightly smaller from when I was in sixth grade. I think it is great to see my improvement over the years. This is the one I keep next to my bed.

main sketchbook for ideas and practise

My experimental dummy

This is  one I think everybody needs. It is a place where I try things and keep inspiration as well like pictures and words. I like to try out new mediums and to experiment with things. Often this is not very neat and tidy so I made a one separate to do this in!

Experiments, motivation and inspiration to create new works and techniques

Travel sketchbook 

I only take this one on short trips because for big trips I prefer my big one. I love sketching outside and I love keeping these original memories. If you want to know what other things I like to take with me, I have an old blog post here.

travel-sized sketchbook for ideas on the go and memories

The three kind of sketchbooks above are probably what I would recommend for everyone (if you don’t just use one sketchbook for everything.) 

My painting class dummy

I recently have started some painting classes. it has been a year since I’ve left school and I felt it was time to get some new feedback on the work I’m creating as well as being active and social. On the “materials needed” list it said; Dummy. So of course I bought a new one just for this class.

extra idea development sketchbook for my painting classes

Random sketchbooks and such

I have some other sketchbooks which have no specific purpose other than storing random ideas in different ways. Some of these are still empty, but most of them have a beginning.

  1. My Paperchase sketchbook;   I bought this one on my trip to Newcastle (UK). They had a very cute Paperchase shop at the train station. This caught my attention because it has tanned paper in the middle and I really wanted to try that. It is supposed to be great to practise values and to capture my ideas depending on values.
  2. SwopbookI just love the idea of this book. This sketchbook is filled with pictures to get your imagination going. This is completely different from all my other sketchbooks. It is supposed to help against artist block/writers block so do check it out. 
  3. My homemade doodle sketchbook; I made this one myself and it is very thin. Still need to fill the last few pages. I used for motivation. 
  4. My empty ones; The last ones are the ones that I still need to start in. Wish me luck for filling these!

swopbooks and homemade sketchbook // keep inspiration and ideas organised

So this were all my sketchbooks (that I own at the moment). Sketchbooks are amazing for keeping ideas, designs or even photo ideas in. 
Let me know if you have a system or if I’m crazy.

I hope this was interesting and inspirational. If you like sketchbooks a lot (like me) and seeing others their sketchbooks I have a post here on calarts entries which are stunning.

Let me know if you enjoy this kind of posts in the comments or on my poll bellow.  I would love to hear from you!

If you have a similar post showing your sketchbooks (or just a few pages) feel free to share them below!

[polldaddy poll=9103056]

6 Responses to “How to organise inspiration in Sketchbooks and dummies – Organising inspiration

  • woow !!! I love those sketchbook ! Wherever I am in the store, I convince myself of buying new one 🙂 Guilty ! I have got addicted from Paperchase, and now I also attracted to Tiger because it is next door. I have got 5 sketchbooks for different things too (sometimes I can’t decide where I wanna write) and carry on buying more and more 🙂

    • I’m glad I’m not the only one! Unfortunately,​ I don’t have paperchase here in the Netherlands as far as I know, but that does give me an excuse to buy from there every time I go to the UK! 😀 Buying new sketchbooks is the best! 🙂

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