< home My 'moodbook' aka my sketchbook, is where I do my drawing without boundaries. I am never too precious about something I sketch. Everyone who sketches will know this, but I feel that some of the marks made by a pencil can never be re-created when traced for an illustration. I'm not a fan of the recent culture for doing a drawing and then tracing and vectorising it. That process takes away the softness of a drawing for me. I prefer the uneven line width and different shades of tone in a line drawing. Even if I come up with a good visual idea in my skechbook and then try to scale it up in a larger more finished drawing, it never has the same immediacy that the original sketch had. This is why I think sketching, for me, is a performance.
	I first began to put more effort into my sketchbooks around about the time I was at college. Whenever I became frustrated with the rudimentary and sometimes mundane projects, I would make up my own drawing tasks, to keep myself interested. Of course these 'sideshow' efforts eventually influenced my main work, but I guess that's how the world is fascinating. So I would do life drawing and sketch my flatmates, I would draw images from magazines and I would also create images from my imagination. The process of drawing from life and from magazines is still important to me as its a way of putting the information into my head, so that when I draw from my imagination, I am recalling some of that information, but the beauty is, that it is never the same.
	© 2009. All rights reserved. Neil Alexander Watson