Sketch journal ideas – you may be the wildest advocate for keeping a daily sketch journal, but where do you come up with an endless stream of ideas? Cartooning things from your day-to-day life, small incidents that you might otherwise forget is a great start. And then of course there are holidays: vacation days when you have extra time, and visit exciting places such as Niagara Falls!
This is the next in the series of videos exploring the possibilities of iconic sites and monuments that you might visit as your travel the globe as sketch journal ideas. It’s far more fun to have your own cartoon of a place you’ve visited them to take a photograph or by a postcard 😉
Today our travel sketch journal idea is Horseshoe Falls at Niagara…
… thanks to an invitation from a newsletter subscriber who lives in nearby Toronto.
When you are using an iconic site like Niagara for sketch journal ideas, you really need to know your subject. Fortunately these days with the Internet there are plenty of reference photos around.
What’s worth ‘chronicling’?
It might be an aerial shot with a wide angle, a close-up aerial shot or a classic scene with the Skylon Tower in the foreground?Perhaps you fancy recording something iconic to the particular site, such as the Maid of the Mist boat, or a helicopter ride that you took.
The sketch journal ideas that are most appropriate really depend on who you are drawing for. If you are the only audience, of course you will know where you were, but if you share your journal images with friends, consider these things:
- will they recognise the scene?
- what story do you want to tell?
- how many frames do you have to work with (i.e. drawing a single cartoon or strip?), and finally
- what suits the personality of your character?
Remember that the ultimate aim is sketch journal ideas with both drama and humour
And the best thing of all is that we’re living in Cartoonland, so some of the rules of reality such as accurate perspective and realistic character sizes do not apply, which is incredibly freeing!
The Da Vinci cartooning course sells out every June
Here’s what Sue Davis had to say recently about it:
I urge anyone thinking about doing this course to go for it, I joined because of my daughter. I wanted to show her that Mummy did learning too even if I was rubbish at it. I wasn’t even good at stick men!
I was complete rubbish at the beginning, except for the circly circles. I persisted because I had told her the grown ups aren’t automatically good at things but we learned it just like she did.
Somewhere along the line I started enjoying it. Somewhere I started to get it. Somewhere along it became my favourite hobby.
I am still not as good as I want to be (because I don’t practice as much as I should) but now I can’t draw well enough to plan to draw for my new website. Here is one I copied for fun recently.
This is how I drew when I started Da Vinci:
Click here to get on the Waiting List