Page One of the Frankensketchbook. Started drawing on June 17th 2020.

One year ago, I was feeling like I wasn’t satisfied with the kinds of artwork I was doing, and wanted to just break out of the rut by drawing a bunch of weird stuff all together for no reason. At the time I had been looking at a lot of images of various Japanese toys that I found online and was really struck by the unbridled creativity and wild designs found in the myriad of wonderful vinyl monsters, robots, mutants, and other characters I saw. Inspired, I wanted to inject some of that into my own work, and not just digitally. It had been awhile since I had kept up with regularly drawing in a sketchbook, probably because I didn’t have one that didn’t have most of the pages already drawn in. There was one sketchbook that was pretty much ruined when many of the pages got water damaged before I ever got to draw in it, but I resurrected it from the dead by transplanting the remaining unused pages from other sketchbooks into it, creating a powerful new sketchbook that would serve my purpose. Frankensketchbook was alive!

I drew on the first page during a live stream on my Twitch channel on June 17th, the night of my birthday. And it was a wild night! I was drawing in front of one of the bigger audiences I ever had, comprised of a fun convergence of people I knew from different places. I went into it without any plan other than to just draw whatever strange characters sprang to mind as I drew them. There were no thumbnails or anything else of the sort, just drawing aliens and kaiju and whatever other weirdos as they came to me.

Villains

One Million Ninjas

Monster Princess

I’ve drawn more pages since then, getting back to it every once in awhile when I’m tired of drawing digitally. To add some focus to each page, I’ll make everything on it fit a loose theme like villains, ninjas, monsters, and so on. Instead of doing a full month of Inktober last year, I did one page in my sketchbook featuring different characters representing the 31 official prompts. Sometimes I will base the page on whatever theme is going on in the art community that month, like March of the Robots and Mer-May.

Inktober 2020

March of the Robots

Mer-May

WiP KaiJune

So now it’s been a whole year since I started the Frankensketchbook. On my birthday this year, I was at it again, working on the next page, and it was another fun stream with a lot of people. I was a little disappointed in myself when I realized that this was only the 8th page in the book after the year of working in it. But when I figure there are like a million things on each page, I guess it’s ok that I haven’t drawn a million pages yet. I do want to take my time and make finished drawings about stuff that I enjoy.

While all the pages have been these big complete compositions full of characters, I can’t treat it too preciously. The pages are getting beat up along the way, with curling corners and wear & tear around the edges. I probably shouldn’t have been drawing all the way to the very edge of the paper. Still, I want to fill the Frankensketchbook with more weird and wacky stuff. It’s been a fun creative outlet and people seem to like to watch the traditional art process. Maybe someday I’ll do something with the artwork and use it in a larger project.

You can watch when I work in the Frankensketchbook, as well as other art other stuff, on my Twitch channel, and keep up when I post drawings and other things like this on my Tumblr.

Sayonara.