Peterman Sara Elands - The Sketchbook Project World Tour

By Chris Jobson
EDITOR IN CHIEF, COLOSSAL To set foot inside the Brooklyn Art Library is to be surrounded by a phalanx of floor-to-ceiling shelves containing thousands upon thousands of artists sketchbooks. With plenty of chairs and tables for reading, discussion, and unexpected discoveries, the library is warm and welcoming. It is the bustling home of The Sketchbook Project, one of the most fantastic global art projects I have ever been involved with. There is simply no place else like it. In 2012 I had the opportunity to curate a selection of books for The Sketchbook Projects first Mobile Library tour across the United States. I was given the option to select entire groups of sketchbooks by theme or keyword, but instead chose to do things the old-fashioned way: one by one.

Over the next three days I endured paper cuts and carpal tunnel as I flipped through nearly eight thousand individual works of art. I encountered drawings, paintings, gestural sketches, landscapes, fully illustrated comic books, collages, photorealistic portraits, pages folded like origami, and abstract geometric experiments. Pages were covered in smudges of pastel, conte, watercolor, graphite, acrylic, chalk, dirt, marker, and even blood and tears. I discovered visual stories, manifestos, admissions of guilt, declarations of love, envelopes of evidence, explosive rants, family secrets, and bitter political diatribes. One paper artist transformed her sketchbook into a giant foldout carousel that spun like a top. One illustrator created a powerful graphic novella providing vivid details of how his family had been destroyed by violence.

Another person had spent weeks transforming the front and back of their sketchbook into a thickly layered collage of paint and metal on par with the most incredible medieval tome. My fingers quivered as I peeked inside. All thirty-two pages were blank. Never judge a book by its cover. In the age of everything digital, where words and images are shared at an increasingly frenetic pace and success is measured in clicks and likes, it is almost miraculous that a worldwide artistic endeavor like The Sketchbook Project even exists. To think that more than thirty-one thousand people of all ages, artistic abilities, and walks of life have enthusiastically committed time and energy to fill the pages of a sketchbook submitted for public consumption is to realize our collective need for something real.

Something permanent. Something that speaks to our human need to take risks, to experiment, and to be understood.

By Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker
COFOUNDERS OF THE SKETCHBOOK PROJECT When The Sketchbook Project first started, we never imagined where it would take us. We never thought that the simple idea of sending a blank sketchbook to anyone who found our humble site and waiting for it to come back could have become the international endeavor it is today. Inside each of the tens of thousands of books housed in the Brooklyn Art Library, our permanent space for The Sketchbook Project, is a legacy, a memoir, a novel, a time capsule, and, most importantly, a real life story. When tasked with picking the spreads to be featured in this book, we were at a loss as to how we could narrow down such a huge amount of content into one book.

We didnt want to favor some over others but rather hoped to showcase just a bit of the sheer talent, meaningfulness, and global reach of this project. We have never before curated the collection on this level. Sure, weve picked out scary books for Halloween, or showed off some great spreads on social media, but for us to pick and choose only a few hundred spreads to be published in a book seemed overwhelming. We decided to organize the material by regions of the world, allowing us to show a slice of the talent and stories behind the project while traveling the world page by page. It would be unfair of us to ever say, These books alone represent The Sketchbook Project. Given the scope of the project, no one book, no matter how big, can capture what it means to be a part of a global movement.

Here, you will find a glimpse into the community. A fraction of what it is and means. Sketchbooks over the years have served as shared memoirs to cancer survivors, inspired some to return to art school, and have been a daily practice to reinspire the dormant or budding artist. You will read accounts by people you have never met. Or you might feel compelled to reach out to someone across the globe who views the world the same way you do. We (Steven and Shane) grew up in separate parts of the country.

Shane was raised in Florida and was making websites at the age of thirteen. Steven grew up in New Jersey, taught himself guitar, and learned to take an idea and turn it into something tangible. Neither was afraid to take a leap and try something out of the ordinary; The Sketchbook Project is just that. Its the worlds attempt at trying something extraordinary. Allowing your story to go out into the world and seeing what flies back can be exciting and scary. We now have a place where anyone is accepted, and a community is created along the way.

Each submission that arrives in our mailbox is treated the same, in the most democratic way. We even have a checkout system that moves through the collection, checking out books evenly across the board. We are honored to be a part of this group, and we are ecstatic to share this tiny window into the collection with you. We hope that you will find a voice to relate to in this book. We hope that you will take it home, flip through the pages, and know that sitting in our Brooklyn library at the time of printing are more than thirty-one thousand more sketchbooks. And, on a hot summers day (or a snowy New York night), other curious readers are also flipping through the pages of these living time capsules.

We hope that you will join us (as we travel the country in our Mobile Library, or the world on our Digital Library) or create something wonderful, and share your story with us and the world.

THE SKETCHBOOK PROJECT is a crowd-sourced library of artists sketchbooks from around the world. It began in 2006 as a simple project open to anyone who signed up online. Starting with only five hundred submissions in that first year, it has grown into a collection of more than thirty-one thousand books from around the globe. Since 2010, the physical collection has resided in its permanent space, the Brooklyn Art Library, growing by thousands of new submissions every year. Daily, visitors explore the stacks, whether they live around the corner or have come from far away to see a book by someone they know.

The Sketchbook Project exists in two other outlets: the Digital Library and the Mobile Library. In addition to the physical library, about half of the sketchbooks can be viewed online through the Digital Library, creating a connection between viewer and artist, even if they live across the world from each other. The Mobile Library is the traveling extension of the Brooklyn Art Library: a custom bookmobile that treks all across the United States and Canada, creating pop-up libraries in small towns and large cities. Technology has always been a catalyst for The Sketchbook Project, from the initial website allowing sign-ups from anywhere, to the eventual in-house built library search system that allows visitors to find physical books based on keywords. The project, however, always maintains ephemeral qualities through the medium of the sketchbook. Over the years, people have casually or wholeheartedly shared their stories.

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