"Satiroplastic" by Gary Panter

I carry all sorts of sketchbooks with me wherever I go. I have a palm-sized one in my back pocket, a 5x7 sized one in my purse, a 6x6 square one, an 8x8 square one, an 8x12 one in my room, and a 16x20 on the kitchen table. My art bag has three different pencil cases: one for my sketch pencils, one for my oil and watercolor pencils, the third for my pastel pencils. This includes pencil sharpeners, three kinds of erasers, a mini-wooden figure, a pack of pastels, my paintbrushes with palette, and a basic set of watercolors.

"Isn't that a bit much to carry around?" someone asked me.

"You never know when you're going to see something to draw or paint," I answered.

Today I picked up Satiroplastic: sketchbook facsimile by Gary Panter. It's about the size of a thick address book or a Palm Pilot. In the introduction, he admits that this was his travel companion, a quick snapshot of images and places he visited from 1999-2001. The pen, ink and marker sketches and scribbles are nowhere close to the clean, polished drawings of his other books, like Jimbo. But this is simply the raw draft, the sketch-on-the-fly, the diamond in the rough.

In fact, most of my sketchbook stuff looks remarkably similar: jagged lines and squishy images, pencil erasures and arrows indicating positions, and jotted notes in the margins for colors. "Building red, with white windows and blue curtains. Mahogany porch with swing, flower pot with orange chrysanthemums, and fire red tulips."

Creativity is all around us; we just have to capture it a moment at a time.
All original writing and art copyright A. Dameron 2000-2011