The importance of personal projects
From playful sketches to picture book ideas
Happy New year, everyone, I hope you had a lovely holiday break, let’s get back to work and may 2025 be a fantastic year for children’s books!
This month
members are talking about the importance of personal creative projects. As you will read in their Substacks, some of the illustrators have been super busy in the past year, tackling several books at once, juggling different deadlines and still trying to find some time for making art as a personal project just for them.I, on the other hand, have spent most of 2024 adding new art to my portfolio and trying out different sketchbook practices. It felt like one long personal project, experimenting with new materials and filling out sketchbooks with different challenges and prompts I found online - but was it just that? Flipping through my 2024 sketchbooks I realised that some of those random drawings were actually a start of a very intentional project - a picture book dummy.
Back in February I participated in an online drawing session by Adam Ming and Katie Stark,
. Their live sessions are always very interesting as Adam and Katie carefully prepare each topic together with a list of fun drawing prompts. That month the theme of Art Gym exercises was animals in picture books and one photo reference of a cute little fruit bat especially spoke to me so after the Zoom I continued sketching bats, researching different species, their habitats and special characteristics. I dedicated a sketchbook to those bat drawings and started collecting story ideas in it, brainstorming names for my bat character, his likes and dislikes, clothes he wears, etc.In the meantime I would start another sketchbook project and then another but kept coming back to my little bat and adding to his character until he became an actual picture book idea I am currently working on with my agent - I hope I can tell you more about the project soon …
New year is a great opportunity to start a brand new sketchbook - last year I managed to fill a little Talens sketchbook with quick, 10 minute drawings of landscapes. Encouraged by this tiny, very manageable page format and the fun I had drawing with coloured pencils I decided to repeat that exercise, making my 2025 sketchbook all about characters, specifically character interactions. Following a list of 100 prompts I hope to fill this personal project sketchbook with all kinds of characters in different situations - who knows, some might sparkle ideas for new, “serious” projects in the future.
And while I’m listing recent personal projects I mustn’t forget my Substack; when I started writing it two and a half years ago this writing platform was very new to me so without much thought I named the newsletter after yet another character doodle from my sketchbook - a slightly mischievous Tarte au citron that became The Lemon Tart Bandit 🍋.
I know I should probably change the name into something more children’s illustration related (any suggestions, dear reader?) but for now I’ve given him a fresh, more cheerful look as we jump into 2025 together!
Don’t forget to join
for our monthly chat on January 20 when we’ll discuss the power of personal projects and how they influence our work and spark creativity. Click below to sign up!Keep drawing and see you soon!
x Damjana