Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:

I have just been reminded that the pencil is a wonderful travel companion. Gabriel Campanario takes it on tour in The Art of Urban Sketching: drawing on location around the world. Funny how with so many apps and tablets with instant web links, artists still want to record their impressions on paper, using techniques that have been around for centuries.

Campanario is the founder of Urban Sketchers website which connects an international following of artists who record their travels and communities. Their motto is “see the world one drawing at a time.”

While most of the book consists of sketches of unique locales, there is also a section called Drawing Inspiration. It deals with typical urban features that offer inspiration to the artist, from skylines, streetscapes, and panoramas to monuments, cars and furniture.

The sketchbooks themselves are interesting. One urban sketcher repurposed old accounting ledgers for his drawings.

I had a lot of fun looking through this book and it reminded me of an older book from the collection, one of our gems. Holy China by Feliks Topolski was published in 1968. With loose and expressive pencil sketches, Topolski recorded the changing landscape of people and places in China in the early days of the Cultural Revolution.

- Candace

Today's blog comes from Candace Weir, Central Library staff:

We just received a new copy of an old favourite, The Artist’s Way: a spiritual path to higher creativity, by Julia Cameron. There are so many ways in which this book works for anyone seeking to explore their creativity. It has remained a perennial favourite with CPL cardholders since it was first published in 1992.

When I first found this book and started out with the exercises, there wasn’t a web presence or iPhone/iPad apps. Today, Cameron has a website and an international community of artists who look to her for guidance.

Starting things is a habit with me, finishing is quite another story; so the second coming of the book is a chance to revisit what could turn out to be a very good habit. It came as a surprise to find that the book is part of a trilogy with the other two titles being Walking in this World: the practical art of creativity and Finding Water: the art of perseverance.

Curiosity getting the better of me, I browsed Finding Water. I discovered that it builds upon the first book’s exercises and clarifies the process. I was surprised to find this helpful and worthwhile and not simply a rehash of the first book.

Let me share a quotation from “Finding Water” that struck a responsive chord. It is by novelist William Styron: “I’ve always had a very comfortable relationship with No. 2 pencils.” Now, there is one of the great truths; he has identified my favourite tool for expressing whatever is on my mind.

Keep your pencil handy. It goes travelling in my next blog.

- Candace

My dining room is also my studio for drawing and painting. This week, it was a mess of paint tubes, brushes, paint-splotched rags and old cottage cheese containers filled with water. Happily, there is basket, which tucks into a nearby shelving unit, to hide these supplies when I want to serve dinner to friends.

To develop and maintain artistic skills, you need to practice them. This gets easier when you have the equipment at hand and a designated place to play with it.

A wannabe artist also needs a way to explore artistic ideas and save them for future reference; an artist’s journal is a great tool for this.

Cathy Johnson shows how to create one with her new book Artist’s Journal Workshop: creating your life in words and pictures. She starts by exploring the why of journal keeping which she believes is the important first step to kick start the process.

She provides information about choosing art supplies and a journal with paper that will support a variety of media. She offers tips about designing the page and overcoming the terror of a blank one.

As well, she explores the different kinds of journal that one might choose to keep – daily journals, travel journals, memory journals and many more. A chapter on the journaling lifestyle is aimed at helping the reader to integrate the journaling habit into everyday activities.

“Keep it up,” she advises. “The way to get closer to your goal of improving your art is to keep making art. You’ll see you’re on the right path when you look through your journals. “