How You Can Improve Your Sketchbook Pages

I know in the beginning of studies alot of students (including myself) continue to find it quite hard to maintain a good quality sketchbook. Infact the majority of students are a bit confused as to what a sketchbook should be used for exactly.

In my eyes a sketchbook is simply a visual record of your thoughts and ideas. Within education it's most often used as a tool to encourage students to record progress, visually presenting an individual's progression through a project.

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Anything that is new is always slightly hard to grasp, and after all education is supposed to be challenging. So if you're finding that filling your sketchbooks with solid content is a bit tricky, this is kind of a good thing!

As it is September and the start of a new academic year I have decided to form a list of my top 5 tips on how your sketchbook pages can be improved.

• Variety is highly important in all aspects of work, however within your sketchbook there is no excuse for you not to have already used and explored with materials no matter how strange they may seem, it's only a sketchbook so the more unique, the better!
• Quality is what will gain you your marks, anybody can see a clear difference between good quality work and work that is created simply to fill pages. Don't feel you need to have a overly filled sketchbook, after all the year has just started so take your time and put 100% into every page.
• Context is so important, especially at the beginning of new projects. It's very easy to get lost in the endless new ideas you will be having once you scratch the surface of your subject matter. Which you should always have in the back of your mind, ask yourself 'where does this fit in?', 'is this really relevant to my subject matter?'.
• Exploration is personally what I believe to be the most important aspect of sketchbook work. This is was will lead to a truly unique and less generic body of work when you reach that deadline, just make sure everything can be linked to your subject matter!
• Stop Fussing! As I have said, it is only a sketchbook! It should only hold around 50% of your work, and alot of that will just be scribbles and notes of ideas you want to try out- so it should never be neat (but don't tell anybody I said that.)