Showing your work

extracts from my sketchbooks

Hello!

I’m very excited to share that Summer Camp Island got an honourable mention as one of the Best Shows of 2023 in the New York Times this week!

In honour of our last post about ‘showing your work’ here is my initial sketch of Oscar as a clown:

which led to Tom Herpich’s more refined version:

which led to our final sweet clown below.

I love seeing inside people’s sketch books - I used to be so precious about mine, wanting every page to be without flaw, so if a stranger stumbled upon them they would not think ‘oh god that drawing of a mouse is so embarrassing!”

As I have gotten older, I have given up the ghost on that one and now drawings of no association hang out right next to each other, full colour elephants next to wobbly sketches of paintbrushes, marker on everything. Flipping through them reminds me of a specific time and headspace in my life, and when I don’t have one on the go I feel a little out of sorts.

I chucked this banana can drawing in the rubbish a few years ago. I didn’t like it:

Then, on leaving my house one afternoon, my friend Stefanie found it on the floor next to our trash can. She picked it up, berated me for littering, and a few months later it showed up in my postbox. It is now one of my favourite possessions:

Today I wanted to share a few of my unedited sketchbook pages, complete with spots of sunlight and embarrassing mice:

enhance:

enhance!

See you next week where i’ll be sharing some Summer Camp ‘show your work’ <3