Gabrielle Sivitz illustrations

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A fall day in the mountains of Montana. Sketching gives you a great excuse to get outdoors!

Many artists keep sketchbooks. It is an important tool where you can stretch your drawing muscles - kind of like workouts before a marathon. It gives you a chance to try out subject ideas or compositions or work through tricky renderings.

Sketchbooks are also a place to record what you see in the natural world, and reflect on how a scene or a thing affected you. You might make note of the way the light influenced the mood of a place or the call of birds made the moment special. Later, when you read through your sketchbook, it may bring back those observations and memories.

I love going through my old sketchbooks periodically and seeing where I've been and how I've changed as an artist over the years. Here are a few samples from some of my sketchbooks.

I certainly did not want to pick this beautiful wildflower, so I sketched it instead and took lots of reference photos to use at a later date.

A crab I found washed up on a Florida beach. You can barely see the graph lines that I used to help me get its proportions and all those complex parts correct.

A partial sketch of a snowshoe hare specimen from the University of Montana. This was done with pen, watercolor and white colored pencil on colored paper.

Zoos and aquariums are great resources for easy observation of unusual subjects. This black rockfish sketch was from the Seattle Aquarium.

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aaaa A fall day in the mountains of Montana. Sketching gives you a great excuse to get outdoors!	Many artists keep sketchbooks. It is an important tool where you can stretch your drawing muscles - kind of like workouts before a marathon. It gives you a chance to try out subject ideas or compositions or work through tricky renderings. Sketchbooks are also a place to record what you see in the natural world, and reflect on how a scene or a thing affected you. You might make note of the way the light influenced the mood of a place or the call of birds made the moment special. Later, when you read through your sketchbook, it may bring back those observations and memories. I love going through my old sketchbooks periodically and seeing where I've been and how I've changed as an artist over the years. Here are a few samples from some of my sketchbooks.	I certainly did not want to pick this beautiful wildflower, so I sketched it instead and took lots of reference photos to use at a later date.
A crab I found washed up on a Florida beach. You can barely see the graph lines that I used to help me get its proportions and all those complex parts correct.	A partial sketch of a snowshoe hare specimen from the University of Montana. This was done with pen, watercolor and white colored pencil on colored paper.	Zoos and aquariums are great resources for easy observation of unusual subjects. This black rockfish sketch was from the Seattle Aquarium.
© Gabrielle Sivitz 2005 None of the images on this website may be used for any reason without the expressed permission of the artist. All rights reserved.
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