A plea for one, two, many sketchbooks
There are some people who doodle while on the phone. They absentmindedly draw with a pen on the margins of newspaper pages, or on paper napkins or cardboard beer mats in restaurants. And often, really great drawings emerge – which unfortunately then end up in the trash.
Are you one of them? Then get yourself a sketchbook, a small, handy one that you can always have at hand. Your drawings are guaranteed to be better off in it than in the trash.
This also applies, and especially so, to children's drawings. This sheet shows an eraser and a glass of apple spritzer, drawn by a four-year-old boy whose parents were clever enough to give him a book with blank pages – and to keep it safe…
Sketchbooks are also useful when traveling, on planes, during long train journeys, and basically anywhere you're out and about. Because wherever you are, there's bound to be something worth seeing. Trust me, a sketch might just be better than a quick smartphone photo. And besides, a drawing of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is always more original and unique than one snapped a million times.
Let's say you're a craftsman, a cabinetmaker for example. Then you should perhaps also get a sketchbook, like Henry Lapp (1862–1904), an Amish man who recorded his ideas for new furniture or tools in a notebook and then showed them to his customers. This book is now part of the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Which means that, under certain circumstances, you might even make it into a museum, even if it's with "great" art in oil and acrylic, the initial designs and inspirations for which you recorded beforehand – naturally in a sketchbook. Just like George Grosz, for example, in 1917.
Or the surrealist Mac Zimmermann in 1948.
Even the smallest book can become art. Here's an image from a private sketchbook made of the cheapest brown paper, measuring just 7cm x 10cm.
Even funny, even silly ideas deserve to be recorded. The poet, painter, and illustrator Robert Gernhardt used a total of 675 DIN A5 Brunnen notebooks for this purpose (from 1979 until his death in 2006). Much of his complete work is therefore unknown; only two of these notebooks were published in 2007 in connection with an exhibition in the Marbach Notebooks. Our illustration is taken from this publication.
Incidentally, most sketchbooks deliberately remain unpublished. After all, your ideas and designs are nobody's business but yours. And you decide what you do with them. But one thing remains: a shelf full of ideas, drafts, doodles, and even messy sketches is still useful after many years, allowing you to look back and discover new things with fresh eyes.
Finally, to conclude our comprehensive appeal, a note on our own behalf: If you want to do graphic recording or graphic facilitation, we also recommend a sketchbook for training, which – let us subtly point out – is available exclusively from us…