My high school had the International Baccalaureate (IB) program instead of AP, and so I took IB higher-level Visual Art in my junior and senior year. As part of our IB grade, we had to submit a “visual journal” that displayed and explained our process of creating work – kind of like a sketchbook. Each month we had to submit different investigations on artists who inspired us, pages with thumbnails and media tests for the next project we were doing, and other work. It organized our thoughts and forced us to articulate our opinions about different media, artists, and techniques. This process, while it was kind of forced and just for a grade, still really helped each of us establish what we were going to pursue for the following project and even who we were as artists.

Most professional and famous artists keep a sketchbook also. It turns out to be one of the best ways to get your thoughts and ideas down in a visual manner. This even holds true for older, more famous artists. For example, Picasso kept many different sketches and journals full of notes when creating Guernica. Because he painted over that piece multiple times, we wouldn’t have been able to see what those previous versions looked like without his journal. Even regular people who don’t consider themselves artists keep journals to express their thoughts and ideas visually in a sort of therapeutic manner. I’m going to talk a little about what I used to do for my own sketchbook, but there’s definitely tons of ways to keep and use a sketchbook.

Artist Investigations:
The first step for me in starting a new project was usually finding inspiration from another artist’s work. I’m not sure how much older famous artists like Picasso found inspiration from other artists, but for students and practicing artists nowadays this is very common. For me, artist investigations involved finding out more about their style, as well as the historical/cultural context they created art in. I also liked to discuss why I was inspired by their work. One of the only paintings I did in high school started with inspiration from artists Eliza Wheeler and JMW Turner. These artists were very different, but they both inspired me to create a painting.

Thumbnails/Media Tests:
The next step was to figure out what I was going to do. Eliza Wheeler is a book illustrator and I was very intrigued by her style, but I wanted to paint real waves. I also wanted to incorporate dramatic lighting in my painting like JMW Turner did. I started doing sketches of boats and rolling waves, and compositional thumbnails.

 

Then, I had to determine what medium I was going to paint in. I could’ve painted in oil, acrylic, or watercolor, but I decided I wanted to paint in gouache. Gouache is kind of like a thicker, more opaque version of watercolor. I started to test out what my painting would look like in gouache. I also made the decision to paint on black paper instead of white, because it would be easier to develop a night scene from that.

Process:

The last part of developing my pieces usually was to describe the process of actually creating them. I would take pictures of my pieces when they were only part of the way through, and kind of describe my rationale behind what I did up to that point. This part would be similar to what I said earlier about how Picasso had documented all of the different versions of Guernica before the final one.

Here’s the final piece that came out of all of this planning:

One aspect of the graded visual journal that I didn’t really incorporate for this specific painting was that my entries were supposed to be visually interesting. Those entries were kind of boring-looking, but I definitely had some other pretty cool-looking journal entries. Here are two of them:

Other artists definitely have really visually interesting entries, which kind of makes the journal look like art itself. I’ve included some pictures below. Keeping a sketchbook can be really inspiring and almost therapeutic for an artist, and is a really great way to help organize one’s thoughts and ideas and plan out a project. Even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, being able to express yourself visually (and not have to show anyone what you create) could be really beneficial.