Josh Morris

Tuesday, 5 July 2011

"Well begun is half done"

This is a continuation of the work I posted last. I'm quite simply re-working things I sketched on the train. This saves me taking my bulky A4, ink pots and watercolours traveling and getting gawped at. I can't see past this way of working at the moment so I'm reluctantly filling sketchbooks with this sort of thing, in hope of clearing it from my system.

I have to say the worst thing about all this time off is not seeing other creatives regularly. I've taken for granted how important feedback, and just a general bouncing around of ideas can be to progress. I will make more of an effort in the future. As for the present, this rut is nothing that inky fingers and sore thumbs cannot fix. It's time to get back to the sketch. A quote to summarize the jist of it all "Well begun is half done" - Mary Poppins. Would you believe it? Well, I've come to understand she herself took it from Aristotle but regardless its origin a splendid saying none-the-less.

Thursday, 30 June 2011

Rejoice! There is colour.

I've been slacking a little with the blog posts. Thats not to say I haven't been cracking on with stuff. Here's just a few of the latest experiments. I Had to inject some colour into my sketchbooks, it all looks drab and boring when its just brown and black. I used the images from some past sketchbooks as well as newer stuff straight from observation. Still a little sketchy I know, but I wanted to get it out there, maybe even get some feedback?

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

An Illustrated Life

Sometime during 2008 I found myself unable to put pen to paper. So stuck in my rut I turned to the last resort and began Googling 'sketchbooks', in the hope that I might find some inspiration lying in and amongst the pages of some random person’s personal drawings. Having sifted through the piles of flowery doodles and sonic the hedgehog traces I found myself on YouTube, being guided through some of the most beautiful sketchbooks I had seen yet.

The artist they belonged too was Danny Gregory a managing director of a major New York ad agency who began keeping illustrated journals in his mid-thirties. As it turns out, he too was looking to see inside the sketchbooks of others, describing them as his "... favourite art form... the closest one can get to being inside the artist's head, to feeling raw creativity flow." However, unable to find a book matching anything near his expectations he decided he had better put it together himself.

And so 'An Illustrated Life' was created. This is a book crammed full of the private sketchbooks of fifty artists, illustrators and designers. There is without doubt something for everyone. The contents of the book span from doodles to full blown works of art. Collage, pen and ink, digital sketching, experimentation and contemporary illustration all feature within. Reportage features most heavily, the author himself draws solely from life, and every creative featured is so different that it makes each new page refreshing and exiting. I have found it incredibly difficult to open a random page and not find something really beautiful. Or to find someone's words of inspiration and insight into the process of creating and filling the books which we all pour our hearts into. The book includes warts and all, the risks and lessons learned, mistakes and smudges are all included. This results in becoming rather a personal book and much more than a coffee table accessory.