Sketchbook Saturday: A study in exploratory sketching

Sketchbook Saturday is something my good friend Charlie Dowd made up, and invited me to play along. There are no rules, no concepts, just sketching.

Sketchbook Saturday in his words: "The “SS” will be a place for silly things that I wouldn’t want to put in my proper portfolio, but are worthy of the internet nonetheless. I encourage all of my fellow artists out there to participate in “SS” with me. It’s a great way to loosen up and do something stupid."

I think I'm going to base my SS posts on a concept I read about called exploratory sketching.

About a year ago, I read a book called "Hot Wiring Your Creative Process - Strategies for print and new media designers" by Curt Cloninger. Curt Cloninger is a contributor of a site that I would often frequent called k10k.net - the designer's lunchbox.

I highly recommend this book to any designer. It's packed with great advise. It really fueled my creative process and has lots of exercises to help push designers out of their comfort zones such as exploratory sketching. I recommend exploratory sketching to all artists to see where it takes them. Exploratory sketching a method used to generate ideas from happy accidents. It is most effective when used with raw materials like pencil, pen and paper.

There are many different methods for exploratory sketching, but this particular image that I sketched posted above was conceptualized by flipping through a dictionary and finding the first noun, and randomly finding the word goose. Then I googled goose for image references. I sketched it with a ball point pen, and added lines behind the goose to create the feel of air, wind and movement (after flipping again to find the first adj. windy). I'm pretty happy with this exploratory sketch. Of course there were many other noun and adj. combinations I did before this one. Some flopped, but some with neat results. The idea is to create results that you would otherwise not think of. I will try a different technique for my next SS post and further explain how I did it.