Messy Desk Dispatch: Telling Stories in My Sketchbook

What I've learned from comics and the joy of playing with narrative in my observational drawings

Capturing a sense of place. Drawing views from the window on holiday in Italy.

Capturing action before take off in my sketchbook.

Hello

In June I’m thinking about SEQUENTIAL IMAGE. I love telling a story when I’m drawing from life in my sketchbook. This play really helps me when I’m making thumbnails for children’s books and thinking about page turns.

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Making links between sketchbook and illustration

Drawing on the train on the way to Bologna in 2024. A landscape of things I saw along the way.

This concertina sequence was the inspiration for the Bologna sketchbook spread. They were made a year apart but I think that everything I make is somehow linked even if I don’t realise it at the time.

One of the best books I have read

Understanding Comics (1993) by Scott McCloud has had a HUGE influence on my sketchbook and illustration work. In this post I’m focussing on his exploration of panel to panel transitions in Chapter 3. Here are the 6 different techniques he identifies with examples of how I’ve experimented with them in my sketchbook.