Vision Journal Collective: Today I am Inspired by : Imitation on a grand (small) scale

One of the things I’ve done to keep creatively active in past years is to contribute to the Sketchbook Project in New York. Each participant receives a simple 5x7 blank sketchbook to fill with whatever interests them.

For one of my most successful projects, I decided to choose 15 artists whose work inspired me, and create my own artwork “in their style” to try and learn how they created their work. I based each piece of art around a favourite quote to give it some focus as well. I titled this sketchbook: Today I Am Inspired by, and you can view the whole thing here

In the end, the process was exhausting, but I learned *so much* it’s become one of my favourite experiences of all time. It was like I sent myself to art college, choosing my own curriculum and parameters. By delving deep into the composition and materials they used, I expanded what I understood about art, and life, in the process. I learned to trust myself much more.

One of my first rules was not to just choose artists that I felt that I already had the skill levels to imitate well. There’d be no challenge in doing that ~ I wanted to grow from the experience. I’ve read since that the perfect learning environment (and not just in art) consists of having a task which is intriguing, but just slightly beyond your current skill set.

In my sketchbook, I not only learned about each artist and how they worked, but also about myself and what I love creating. It was so great that I’d actually like to do it again ~ choosing a new set of artists next time.

In case you're interested, here's a link to the other Sketchbook Projects I've done.

I loved this project so much that I decided to create a book detailing not only the artists who inspired me but also everything I learned in the process. If you came to class, I had the book for show and tell, and even though I can't reprint the book for everyone, I'm posting all the pages here for you to see.

WARNING: There are LOTS of pictures ahead! After these introductory pages, you'll find a series of post, each with a page about each artist who inspired me, what I liked about their work and how I think I did, followed by an image of the art I did inspired by them, paired with one of my favourite quotes.