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Generating Ideas: Sketchbook Practice, Artist Research & Your Own Reference

You’ll be able to

The sketchbook is the engine, not the archive

Most weak investigations begin with a student deciding on an idea at a desk. Strong ones are found by drawing. The working method is unglamorous: 15–20 minutes of observational drawing from life every day — the corner of a room, a hand, a bag of onions, the same window in different light — with short notes in the margin ("this edge went dead", "the shadow was lighter than I drew it", "the folds only work when I stop outlining"). Quantity comes first because you cannot see your own obsessions until there are enough pages to compare. After two or three weeks you reread the sketchbook for repeats, not for quality: what did you keep going back to, and what problem did you keep failing at? That repeated problem is the raw material of an inquiry. Date every page, and keep the failures — in drawing, the discarded attempt is often the most honest evidence of investigation you own.

Artist research: take the mechanism, not the image

Influence is expected and legitimate; copying is not. The difference is what you extract. Weak research collects images it likes and then produces drawings that look like them. Useful research names the mechanism in drawing terms and tests it. Käthe Kollwitz gets crushing weight into a charcoal figure largely by massing the darkest value low and losing edges into the ground; Seurat drew with conté crayon on laid paper so the paper tooth broke the tone into a vibrating, edgeless gray; Redon built velvety blacks in charcoal by layering and fixing rather than pressing harder. Those are transferable mechanisms — a value strategy, a ground, a layering order — and you can run any of them on your own subject without producing a copy. A four-step protocol: find the effect that grabbed you, name the mechanism (tool, mark, value strategy, ground, order of work), test it on your own subject in the sketchbook, and write one line on what changed. Note the artist by name on that research page so your process stays honest and traceable.

A personal question — from reference you made yourself

Generic themes — identity, nature, mental health, social media — arrive pre-digested, which is exactly why they generate generic drawings: everyone already knows what the pictures are supposed to look like. A personal question starts from something you actually observed and ends in a drawing problem, so nobody can predict the images in advance. The reference material follows the same logic. When you shoot your own reference you control the light, angle, distance, and framing, so the reference can be built to serve the inquiry — and you can reshoot when the drawing tells you the light was wrong. A found photograph hands you someone else’s composition, someone else’s value structure and someone else’s decisions, then leaves you with only the transcription to do. Draw from life whenever the subject allows it; photograph your own reference deliberately when it does not; keep that reference in the sketchbook beside the drawing it produced.

Worked example

A student announces, "my Sustained Investigation is going to be about identity." Show the sketchbook-driven process that turns this into a workable personal inquiry.

  1. 1.Set the theme aside for two weeks and draw only from observation — 20 minutes a day, from life, whatever is in front of you, dated and annotated.
  2. 2.Reread the pages for repeats rather than for quality: this student drew their grandmother’s hands four separate times, the same kitchen window twice, and wrote three times that the creases "hold the light in pools".
  3. 3.Name the drawing problem inside the repeat: not "identity" and not even "family", but how thin skin and deep creases handle light — a problem of soft value transition and edge behavior.
  4. 4.Research one artist for a mechanism, not an image: massed dark value with edges lost into the ground, tested on a single hand study in charcoal to see whether it gives the creases weight.
  5. 5.Build reference you own: photograph the hands yourself under raking window light so the creases catch, from an angle you chose, with the option to reshoot.
  6. 6.State it as a question and check it can drive many different drawings rather than one drawing repeated.
Answer: The theme "identity" becomes an inquiry: "How can soft value transitions and broken, lost edges in charcoal describe age in the creases of a hand?" It came out of observed repetition rather than a decision at a desk, it names a controllable drawing problem, its reference is the student’s own so the light and angle can be tuned to the question, and the artist research contributed a mechanism — massed dark and lost edges — instead of an image to copy.
Tip

Make the sketchbook cheap and constant: 20 minutes daily, from life, dated, with one written line per page about what the drawing taught you. Those lines cost seconds and later become both your written evidence and the order in which you present your images.

Watch out

A folder of saved online images is not research and is not reference. Drawing closely from a photograph you did not take means inheriting its composition, lighting and value structure — and if it is not substantially transformed and credited, it is plagiarism. Note also that switching medium (photo to charcoal) is not transformation on its own.

Checkpoint

A student is struck by an artist whose charcoal figures feel crushingly heavy. What is the most productive way to use that research in a Sustained Investigation?

Checkpoint

Why is reference the student photographed themselves usually stronger for a drawing investigation than an image found online?

Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.

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