Katherine Sugrue (it's pronounced "soo-groo"): Sketchbooks! Part 1: the small one

Happy New Year! One of my resolutions is to be a much better student, and while I can't undo how much I've neglected this blog over the past few months, I can stop it from getting any worse. Christmas has been a stressful time for me, as it always is - I don't deal well with routine changes and interacting with 10+ people at once, and I've needed several days to recover from each instance of the latter. That's not an excuse, but hopefully it provides some explanation for why I work the way I do - everyone tackles things differently, after all.

I've kept two sketchbooks over my first semester at UWE: an A6 one for observational and imaginative sketches, and an A4 one for notes, but plenty of doodles (of both kinds) find their way in there too. I'll make at least two posts compiling my sketches, starting with the majority of the small one (I've cropped out some notes that would probably only make sense to me anyway, as well as some of the more personal, self-indulgent doodles) in all its sprawling, disorganised glory, followed by a compilation of doodles from the big one, possibly along one or two themes.

Click "Read More" to see it!

I have a habit of drawing people I meet at uni whom I know I'll be meeting again. Being an artist is a very handy thing when you're terrible with names.

Katsuko is the main character of my little personal project, Mudskipper - a webcomic I created as a way to practice telling a story visually, creating characters and composing shots for storyboards. I'll post more about it later, but I also keep a separate blog for the Mudskipper universe.

I had the amazing good fortune to attend a talk with Glen Keane at the Watershed theatre, where he screened "Duet" and talked us through his career and the making of the film, then did autographs and sketches on a free print everyone in attendance received:

(obviously this isn't from my sketchbook, but sometimes you just gotta show off!)

I asked him what advice he would give himself as a first-year student, and that advice was: "keep a sketchbook,""expose yourself to as many artists and influences as possible" and "draw in pen" - which is why so much of this sketchbook is in the cheapest ballpoint pen imaginable! I've found it great fun.

This was an experiment to see if I could draw on the coach to London with almost no light - it was an interesting experience, because as I noted, I needed to rely on touch more than sight. I added the colour after the fact; my memory of orangish black on top of greenish black was very vivid, though the divide was more subtle in real life.