book review: The Sketchbook Project Journal

Have you ever heard of The Sketchbook Project? It's an incredible project run by a Brooklyn based company called The Art House. They organize a wide variety of community art projects, the biggest of which is The Sketchbook Project.

From their website:  The Sketchbook Project is a global, crowd-sourced art project and interactive, traveling exhibition of handmade books. Our community is made up of over 75,000 people, and our permanent collection at Brooklyn Art Library holds over 26,000 sketchbooks from 135 countries around the globe. 

We invite participants from all walks of life to fill the pages of a blank sketchbook and send it back for inclusion in our ever-growing library of inspiration.

They've got a nifty little video that describes what the project is about:

In addition to their wonderful work bringing artists from the world together, they've put out a book:

Actually, calling it a book is wrong. This is a fully interactive 192 page experience.

Every page has a prompt and then a whole lot of blank space for you to do your thing. There are writing prompts, drawing prompts and they even encourage you to stitch on some of the pages. (Caught my eye, loved that they included us fiber-y folks.)

I had another long day in the studio again and afterward, took a break to start working in it:

It was very calming and the little prompt at the top of the left hand page that says FORGET EVERYTHING THAT WAS SAID BEFORE, THIS IS WHERE WE and then if you can see around my scribbles and writing, it says START about halfway down the page.

More then enough to set me loose. This is clearly going to be a great tool for unwinding at the end of the day. I'm truly impressed with it.

I noticed another thing today when I was flipping through it, the dust jacked comes off:

And it reveals a cover that you can scribble on like mad and customize to really make it your own.

If you like to journal but hate figuring out how to get around the dreaded white page, I really recommend giving this one a shot. It's a project all set up and ready to go whenever you are!