We always hope that our five-day DRSB workshop participants will begin keeping sketchbooks after the course ends. Quick drawings in a sketchbook, done on a regular basis, will keep new skills alive and growing! A sketchbook and a pencil are all you need—powerful tools!
I hope that this remarkable set of sketchbook drawings will inspire you. 21-Year Old WWII Soldier’s Sketchbooks Reveal a Visual Diary of His Experiences They are by Victor Lundy, who is now 92, and were drawn during the early days of America’s participation in World War II.
They are superb examples of quick sketching. Lundy must have been only 19 or 20 when he did the drawings, but even at that young age, he had wonderful skills—absolute sureness of line, proportion, lights and shadows, everything. The drawings provide perfect examples of the way time is embedded in pencil line: one can sense precisely how fast his pencil was moving in many of the drawings.
The sketchbooks also show that subject matter can be anything at all—anything you see, such as Lundy’s beautiful drawing of “A View from My Bunk.”
Here is the whole collection online at the Library of Congress now: Victor Lundy Collection at Library of Congress.
~ Betty Edwards
