REVIEW: “Allow yourself to create. Artbooks, sketchbooks and travel diaries ", Natalie Ratkowski

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

This book attracts attention by the fact that it is beautifully designed: on the cover and flyleaf we see magical illustrations. When you start flipping through the book, it turns out that it is all filled with such illustrations - sketches and sketches of the author and other artists.

Natalie Ratkowski not only shows this world of colored sketches, mixed fantasy and reality, she invites everyone to create their own world. And this really applies to everyone, not just artists and illustrators, although this book can be recommended to them first of all. If you have wanted to start drawing for a long time - here it is, the chance.

In this book, you will find many tips, tricks and valuable ideas for creating your artbook. What it is? As the name suggests, this is a creative notebook in which you express yourself. It is difficult to give any more precise definition, because there are a great many varieties of artbooks.

In it, you can just make sketches on any topic or no topic at all, you can glue collages from clippings, tickets and other small nonsense that you found on the street, for example. You can create detailed and detailed works of art or just randomly sprinkle paints to express your current mood.

To be honest, this idea just fascinated me - to create a hand-drawn version of a diary, on each page of which your day will be abstractly depicted. But I want to talk about this experience in a separate post, and now in more detail about the book by Natalie Ratkowski.

Why create your own artbook

As an introduction, the author talks about her personal experience: why she, a professional illustrator working with orders on a computer, started creating artbooks. In the first chapters of the book, she explains why such unpaid creativity is needed.

For people like me, who have never received money for their drawings, everything is clear and so: it's an interesting hobby that brings pleasure. But for artists accustomed to getting paid for their work, creating beautiful notebooks with sketches and collages may seem useless. Why do this? To waste your work and gather dust on the shelf?

But not everything in this life is done for money. We walk and chat with friends just like that, just ride a bike and watch interesting films for a fee. Creating an artbook is the same pleasure that helps to relieve tension, throw out all your emotions on the pages, and even works as a therapy (the book contains real examples of people's recovery).

Creating an artbook is a pleasure that helps to relieve tension and throw out all your emotions on the pages.

After analyzing the reasons, the author turns to the types of creative notebook, and it turns out that there are a great many of them, for every taste and color.

They are so different

In the section of the book "Everything you need to know to create your own artbook" the author shows different types of notebooks so that everyone can choose what they like. Drawn artbooks, diaries with travel notes, artist's diaries with sketches, scrapbooks created from what was found at home, notebooks on the same topic - each of the creative notebooks looks so great that you immediately want to start creating something like that.

And then you see specific advice on how to create it. The author helps you choose paper for specific paints or other tools, tells how and from what you can create a notebook.

There is a kind of special warmth in this, when you do not buy a notebook in a store, but make it yourself, even if it turns out to be somewhat crooked. By the way, the book has an excellent step-by-step guide with photos on how to make your own notebook. Everything is very clear, so I managed to make my own artbook, though it took 2 days for it (you have to wait until the glue dries, the paper comes in, etc.).

But if someone prefers store options - please, old collage diaries, an accordion book, a cardboard baby book - whatever your heart desires.

Natalie talks about how to attach collage materials, including her own experience and her own little "chips", the choice of color and color combinations, composition rules, herbariums and collages, and even gives advice on setting up a workplace.

Visibility in everything

Throughout the book, Natalie does more than just talk about creating artbooks and different techniques. Her description is invariably accompanied by photographs of her work or the work of other artists.

Toward the end of the book, she even shows the step-by-step creation of spreads, where the photographs clearly show how a new page is created in different techniques.

From this section, you can draw inspiration and learn new, still unfamiliar techniques. When you look at the step-by-step process of creation, your ideas in this technique are immediately born in your head. The main thing is not to forget them.

Yet not only pleasure

If you absolutely need to make money on your creativity, there is nothing wrong with that - this is an understandable desire, especially if you are good at it.

In the last section, Natalie tells artists how to make money by creating artbooks. For example, you can post your work on Etsy and other similar sites, or even get into an art exhibition of such works.

The book contains tips for presenting your work: how to photograph it, how to present it in communities, and what not to do.

Who is this book for

I believe that the book "Let Yourself Create" will suit absolutely everyone. Someone may say that he is not a creative person and does not know how to draw at all, but I am firmly convinced that “non-creative” people do not exist.

As for the skill, you don't have to upload your work somewhere or at least show it to someone, but skill comes with experience. You get pleasure from the drawing process itself, it is addictive, and one might even call it a certain type of meditation. Meditation on your creativity.