Keep an idea sketchbook

This is a simple trick to improve your art practice.

Keep an idea sketchbook, it is a special book in that it is a cross between a modern commonplace book and a sketchbook.

A commonplace book is a perfect place to write down and sort all manner of tidbits from quotes to observations or musings and ideas about art. It’s called a common place book because you collect all of this information in one common place and it becomes kind of a centralized area of where you keep all of your ideas in one area for a certain period of time.

I have been keeping an idea sketchbook since I was in architecture school. I was given a sketchbook at some weekend retreat and was told about how helpful it was to gather all sorts of ideas in one place. This book has been instrumental in me gathering and writing down ideas, musing about my career, and sketching out painting ideas or just sketching in general.

Here are some of my random notes and sketches.

The only sacred rule about this book is that there is no rule. You just write down or draw whatever you want to at any given time.

Though I do have one hint to help with organization and for in the future when you want to go back and review notes you wrote before. At the top of every page I draw a horizontal line and then above it I put the date and then the topic or subject matter of that page. If there are more than one topic on a page, I will write both of them in that upper portion of the page. This is so helpful for when I’m going back and looking at old ideas sketchbooks from several years ago and I’m flipping through the different pages.

Good luck and have fun.