Expressive Sketchbooks

Focuses on techniques and methods for using a sketchbook to improve your artistic practice.

Expressive Sketchbooks shares a host of creative ideas and prompts, tools and techniques, methods for working around obstacles and barriers, and tons of visual inspiration to help you grow in your sketchbooking practice. An expressive sketchbook is a place for you to explore, express, and enjoy your own innate creativity on your own terms. It is a safe playground for the imagination-a place to mess about, play, and experiment-and to gain confidence in your abilities as you develop your skills.Expressive Sketchbooks offers techniques and creative exercises that incorporate mark making, watercolor,mixed media, collage, words and text, and more. It unpacks some of the obstacles and barriers that you may face along the way and offers wisdom and encouragement to help you decide why and how to start your sketchbook and how to develop and expand your artistic practice. This book is packed with ideas and exercises, including:

• Exploratory drawing exercises How to utilize color in your sketchbook
• How to create dynamic and varied sketchbook pages
• How to find inspiration in nature and in your everyday life
• Ways to mix media and art supplies
• Ways to kickstart your creativity
• How to find and develop a process that feels personal to you

Through this book, you'll find out what lights you up, what makes you curious and fascinated, and what makes you expansive. Discover how to magnify your creativity and enliven your art skills by using an expressive sketchbook as your daily companion.

About the Author

Helen Wells is an artist from the South Coast of England. Her art works are intricate and organic and depict illusionary surfaces or landscapes. With multiple layers, fragments, colors, and obsessive decorative details, her ethereal patterned works bring to mind elements of the natural world or magical other-worlds. Her artworks are in private collections all over the world and have featured on numerous products, from book covers to wine bottles. In 2014, she co-won Winsor & Newton's Watercolor Revolution competition which resulted in her painting being displayed in the Saatchi Gallery in London. She has also been featured in magazines and exhibited her work at one of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants in London. She became an artist later in life after working in an office job for many years. She credits her use of sketchbooks with her finding her artistic style and the courage to develop her art outside of their pages. She is passionate about sketchbooks as a tool for self-discovery, play, and creativity and keen to share everything she has learned along the way.