Category Archives for Inspiration

Featured Artists from the Community: May 2020

For this month’s roundup of artists from our community, we meet Helen Leigh-Phippard, Ken Hill, and Truc-Ha Duong. From an extraordinary streak of amazing portraits, to fitting in daily sketchbook pages between busy work and family lives, these artists bring so much diversity and vibrancy to our community. Helen Leigh-Phippard, Brighton, UK Helen Leigh-Phippard has come […]

Painting Realistic Skin Tones with Watercolor

A Guide to Painting People with Personality Whether you’re a beginner or advanced, we’ve all been there. You decide to add a person to your watercolor piece, but you can’t quite get it right. It ends up missing something, not looking realistic or as you imagined. An oval with a flat wash of color has […]

Art Lessons to Live By: Advice from Art Bootcamp Instructors

Whether you’re completely new to art-making or just want to refresh some basic skills, our new Art Bootcamp course can help you find (and stay on!) your creative path. We’ve compiled this list of hard-won advice from our course instructors—all professional artists with years of experience in their fields—to get you inspired. Sketchbook Skool Art […]

Is Creativity Inherited?

Genetics may play a role in creativity, but the choice to make art and be creative matters more. Creativity in all forms – art, music, writing – is so complex that it’s hard to pinpoint its source. A recent study of humans and song birds revealed that musical ability may, in fact, have a genetic […]

Fill your sketchbook with the contents of your cupboards

5 Ways to Fill Your Sketchbook

Filling an empty sketchbook with all new drawings doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Learn 5 tips to fill a new sketchbook page by page and remember that the drawing you make will always be better than the drawing you didn’t make at all. Buying a brand new sketchbook can feel so exciting. A new beginning! […]

one art supply that an artist should have

The One Art Supply Every Artist Needs

Hint: You don’t need much to be creative. Get back to basics with the basic art supplies every artist needs. I know a lot of artists and, no matter their skill level, we all have one thing in common: we hoard art supplies. Visiting an art supply shop (or e-commerce site) is like being a […]

Drawing at Home in the Time of Coronavirus

by Koosje Koene Throw out all the rules and start to see things differently. Tips for drawing at home when going outside for inspiration isn’t an option. Anxiety Just a few weeks ago, social distancing was a brand new term (at least to me), and now, it’s become very familiar in the time of Coronavirus. As […]

How to Cope with Worry, Stress and Anxiety

These are times of worry, stress and anxiety. History is thrashing around like an avalanche, the solid ground is shifting, the familiar landscape is collapsing. We shrink when a stranger coughs. Wildfires. Politics. Economics.The news cycle is unrelenting. My watch buzzes to tell me my broker is emailing, that I’ve been sitting for too long, […]

Reflections: How My Sketchbook Helped Me Heal

When I was in my late thirties, I started to draw because I was looking for meaning. A horrible accident had left my first wife in a wheelchair, and, in a heartbeat, the universe became a bleak and incomprehensible place to me. But I discovered that when I slowed down and focussed on drawing something, […]

Filling Up Your Creative Tank

About half a year ago, I bit the bullet, and bought an iPad Pro. I had already dabbled a little on my old iPad 2 using Procreate, but it just didn’t feel right. I didn’t like the idea of drawing on a piece of glass, and the styluses that I tried were kind of stubby […]

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