#158 - What Is Your Sketchbook Metaphor, How Does The Way You Create Compare To How People Do It In Other Disciplines?
It matters for how you practice. 
friend artist collects beautiful, wonderful little objects he found around the world over the past decades. I realized that I do the same thing: I collect beautiful little things, drawing them into my sketchbook. It’s my private collection of little things of beauty I found around me, so copying work from others is also okay. That’s why I wanted to make my art; after all, I became completely enamored with art by others and wanted to learn how to make it myself.
It’s a metaphor for how I use my sketchbook; I collect the beautiful little things I see around me by copying them to my sketchbook.
Before that, I had hypothesized that Kim Jung Gi probably learned how to draw from imagination by drawing things he saw around him from memory. That is hard work, it is hard practice, it is training. He was trying, observing what he made, figuring out where to improve, and doing that every day.
Like an athlete.
That’s another metaphor I sometimes use: training like an athlete.
(open ArtPodPlay in separate page)
Sometimes, I feel like doing hard practice, and I do drawings from memory, drawing directly in pen, training like an athlete. Sometimes, my sketchbook is a collection of beautiful things I see around me and copy into my sketchbook from observation, drawing directly in pen.
I am not suggesting you copy my metaphors. They may not suit you! But it could be a good idea to figure out which metaphors fit best what you are trying to achieve. Are you training like an athlete? Or collecting beauty objects? Or you are a designer and more like a chef, combining ingredients in just the right proportions and orienting them just the right way. Or you are a performer, using your whole body to get the right marks and creating expressive gestures as you feel the poses in your body. Or maybe you want to make comics, and the metaphor is that people gather around you at the campfire and you are a storyteller, or it is more like a fairy tale with a hidden moral, conveying a myth of an ideal society for people to believe in? Or you want to move people and evoke emotions with color and abstract composition.
Et cetera.
Your metaphors may be different! But for me, it helps to keep an analogy in mind: train like an athlete or collect little forms of beauty. It guides me as I understand what I am trying to do.