Sketchbooks Quotes

• My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Witness, Happens

  65 Copy quote

• It is often we come the closest to the essence of an artist... in his or her pocket notebooks and travel sketchbooks... where written comments and personal notes provide an intimate insight into the magical mind of a working artist.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Notebook, Artist, Essence

  26 Copy quote

• When I see someone with an immaculate sketchbook, I don't trust that person.

  Kody Chamberlain

  Don't Trust, Persons, Immaculate

  38 Copy quote

• Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.

  Sigmar Polke

  Drawing, Not Sure, Experiments

  38 Copy quote

• When it comes to my art work I would say that I am a perfectionist, although my sketchbook, and my process, is a mess.

  Noma Bar

  Art, Perfectionist, Process

  Interview with Drew Dernavich, www.newyorker.com. September 17, 2008.

  25 Copy quote

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• The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.

  Robert Henri

  Moving, Hunters, Stopping

  Robert Henri (2007). “The Art Spirit”, p.11, Hachette UK

  29 Copy quote

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• How many of you are creative? I don't know, but for me, when you make a bunch of things over time and then you keep them... you forget. I look through my sketchbooks and I'm an audience for myself.

  Demetri Martin

  Creative, Looks, Forget

  18 Copy quote

• For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

  Robert Motherwell

  Mean, Drawing, Secret

  19 Copy quote

• I filled my sketchbook with drawings, very much as any educated girl of my generation might have kept a diary.

  Gabriele Munter

  Girl, Drawing, Generations

  Interview with Edouard Roditi in 1958. "Dialogues: Conversations With European Artists at Mid-Century". Book by Edouard Roditi, p. 114, 1990.

  18 Copy quote

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• I paint a little and keep sketchbooks because it has the effect of preventing me becoming lazy about looking. The subject could be anything.

  Richard Billingham

  Lazy, Littles, Becoming

  13 Copy quote

• Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

  Carl Sandburg

  Dream, Dust, Blood

  Carl Sandburg (1928). “Smoke and steel: Slabs of the sunburnt West. Good morning, America”, Harcourt, Brace and World

  15 Copy quote

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• Picasso spent hundereds of hours carefully planning his masterpieces. The sketchbooks were filled with ideas, bits and pieces, test runs, none of it meant to be seen by anyone. In a similar way, rowing practices are our sketchbooks, where we prepared our raceday masterpiece.

  Brad Alan Lewis

  Running, Practice, Ideas

  13 Copy quote

• I always had a sketchbook with me when I was young. I was hiding behind it, basically, hiding behind drawing because I couldn't cope with people in real life; I was very shy and very nervous around people.

  Robert Crumb

  Real, Drawing, People

  13 Copy quote

• Ever since I was very young, as far back as I can remember, I have loved making pictures. I knew even as a child that, when I grew up, I would be an artist of some kind. The lovely feeling of my pencil touching paper, a crayon making a star shape in my sketchbook, or my brush dipping into bright and colorful paints — these things affect me as joyfully today as they did all those years ago.

  Eric Carle

  Stars, Children, Artist

  50 Copy quote

• I don't know if I've ever had a muse per se. I would say that the woman I'm inspired by exists more in my sketchbooks. She exists in my head.

  Erdem Moral?oglu

  Inspired, Muse, Knows

  Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

  12 Copy quote

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• I thought the iPhone was great, but this takes it to a new level - simply because it's eight times the size of the iPhone, as big as a reasonably-sized sketchbook... Anyone who likes drawing and mark-making will like to explore new media.

  David Hockney

  Technology, Media, Drawing

  12 Copy quote

• Learn how to draw. It's the basis of what we [animation directors] do. Keep a sketchbook. Try making a very simple little film. Try and tell a story clearly and entertainingly. Study the way people move and animate move. Observe all you can, and try and capture that simply in a few lines on paper.

  John Musker

  Moving, Simple, People

  Source: movieweb.com

  10 Copy quote

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• I had thought comics could only be one thing, and that was what mainstream comics were selling us. And the undergrounders proved anything you had in your head, as long as you had the skill to put it down on paper, was fair game. And I started filling sketchbooks with my own comics.

  Stephen R. Bissette

  Games, Skills, Long

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2009.

  16 Copy quote

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• I used to bring my sketchbook to gym class and doodle, because I am a very uncoordinated athlete.

  Kate Voegele

  Athlete, Class, Used

  10 Copy quote

• Us on hard drugs? That would be horrible. We'd probably end up sounding like Bryan Adams.My girlfriend has this quote in her sketchbook: Remain orderly in your life so you can be free and chaotic in your work. I think basically you lose it when you destroy your brain or destroy yourself emotionally or burn yourself up.

  Thom Yorke

  Girlfriend, Thinking, Drug

  15 Copy quote

• I like to make myself laugh. When I'm just sitting with a sketchbook and trying to make myself laugh or trying to come up with ideas, I try not to worry about aim right away. I'm just sort of shooting in all directions.

  Barry Blitt

  Ideas, Laughing, Worry

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Many years after animating Ariel, I continue to draw her, doodling as I talk on the phone, absent-mindedly passing time in a sketchbook. She has become a part of me and yet now belongs to the world and generations to come.

  Glen Keane

  Phones, Years, Doodling

  10 Copy quote

• She was a Jew feeder without a question in the world on that man's first night in Molching. She was an arm reacher, deep into a mattress, to deliver a sketchbook to a teenage girl. (84.25)

  Markus Zusak

  Girl, Teenage, Night

  7 Copy quote

• Now he's [Cinna] arranging things around my living room: Clothing, fabrics, and sketchbooks with designs he's drawn. I pick one up and examine one of the dresses I supposedly created. You know, I think I show a lot of promise," I say. Get dressed, you worthless thing.

  Suzanne Collins

  Thinking, Design, Promise

  7 Copy quote

• When I was either 7 or 8 years old, I did a sketch every day of my teacher and what she wore. At the end of the year, I gave her the sketchbook. For me, the sketching of dresses was about fantasy and dreams.

  Alber Elbaz

  Dream, Teacher, Years

  4 Copy quote