Week 4

Reflective Visual Journals.

An RVJ should be a place where we can escape from pressure, doubt or criticism and just be free. As an illustrator, it is important that we learn to allow ourselves to explore, because this is how ideas are generated. Drawing and sketching is like thinking from your brain, down through your hand and onto the page. Just mulling over how a piece of work might look or should be approached will be detrimental to the outcome, ideas come from doing! But if we use our RVJ to brainstorm and experiment visually, you will spark and generate things you wouldn’t have had before, things that mightn’t even have entered your mind. This will vastly contribute to the quality of the finished work. It’s this freedom to expand and nurture our ideas that makes the RVJ so essential.

The beauty of this way of working is that there is no need to be precious about the standard, it is by being loose and experimental that we grow and improve. Trying different things out to see what works best. Also, this practice means that when idea does pop our into our head, we can get it roughly and keep it, work from it, instead of losing it from our memory. You should always keep your RVJ handy so if you see something inspirational, you can record it. These pictures show some sketchbook work of Stella Im Hultburg, an artist I admire. They show simply how just playing around with shape and composition on the page has fed it’s way into her finished paintings.

Fighting with ourselves.

Of course we always want our work to meet our standards and intentions. It’s not easy to leave things rough or let something go where we hadn’t intended it. This is where the struggle between the left and right sides of the brain come into play. The right side is our childlike, creative and carefree part of us that just wants to play and explore. Logic doesn’t come into it. But the right side wants to organise and analyze everything, judge it, keep it in check. It is the balance of these two that help us run our everyday lives, but in art, the constant battle with our inner critic takes time and practice to subdue.