Inside the Sketchbook of James Hobbs

James Hobbs is a London-based artist and author with a prolific sketchbook practice. In this Inside the Sketchbook feature, James discusses the mystery behind what draws him to a subject, how his preferred drawing materials have evolved, and the excitement of the blank page.

Inside the Sketchbook of James Hobbs

I started drawing in sketchbooks when I was at art school in the 1980s and I’ve never stopped. I’ve used them in different ways over that time. At first, they were a seedbed for ideas for paintings, but this has evolved. Some are simply about living in the city of London, some are travel diaries, some have been dismembered to sell as individual drawings, and some contain drawings that I scan and adapt to sell as prints. I almost always have a sketchbook with me, ready for the moment to strike. I feel naked without one.

I’m still not sure what makes me stop somewhere to draw – I usually work on location – but I don’t care to analyse this too much. Sometimes it can be a particular place with relevance to me, a newsworthy event like a political demonstration, or a feeling that I just need to make marks and create. I can go a few weeks without drawing but it is vitally central to me as a person, not just as an artist. I like the artist and writer Stephen Farthing’s description of sketchbooks as being, in computing terms, “the external hard drive of the mind”.

I have more than 200 finished sketchbooks. The earliest were the yellow and red Daler-Rowney Spiral Pads A6, about 35 of them, bought from the art college shop. Throughout the 1990s I made my own, and since then have generally used black A5 and A6 hardback books, usually Daler-Rowney or Seawhite.

I tend to start one and then follow it through to the end, so there is a narrative sense to them. I’ve started dating them on the spine and cover so there’s an order and a definite sense of progression. I have a selection of larger sketchbooks too, which I use in the studio in a more random way. I have my eye on Pith sketchbooks, which open completely flat, so I’ll try them out soon.

I use Posca pens, often just black, usually 0.9-1.3mm in size. It’s a pleasingly thick size for an A5 or A6 sketchbook. I can work fast, ignoring the details. The dense blackness on white paper is so gloriously direct and no-nonsense. Sometimes I’ll use a few greys, or white, or the odd bit of colour, but I naturally gravitate to monochrome.

I love the opaqueness and permanence of Poscas – ink stays on the page when you put it there. You can layer things on top, obliterate what isn’t working, move elements about. They can misbehave: I have countless images where ink has gushed uncontrollably onto the paper to leave pools, but I let it dry, or move the ink about to incorporate it into the image. I make the kind of work that can be enhanced by unexpected events like that.

The early sketchbooks are full of pencil drawings. I adore the woody organicness of pencils but there can be something too tentative and gentle about the drawings I make with them. I love charcoal too, but it really won’t do for sketchbooks. Fineliners seem too underpowered for what I want to do. When I work in the studio I sometimes use Indian ink on loose sheets and sometimes in sketchbooks. All my work is domestic scale.

Sometimes I scan the drawings to bring colour to them on an iPad with Procreate to sell as limited edition prints. I’m intrigued by how well my A5 drawings made on the street can scale up to A2 or A1 prints.

I can write quite a lot in my sketchbooks. Some of this is to put the drawings into context, like where and when they were done. But when I’m travelling or when some momentous event takes place, say a family birth or death, I often write longer diary entries. The books become a physical representation of the emotions involved in significant personal episodes and are therefore incredibly precious to me. The perceived technical quality of the drawings is unimportant.

I have, for instance, a small homemade sketchbook from when we travelled to Berlin with my late father-in-law to visit the places he’d known from his childhood in the 1920s and 1930s. The book includes drawings, but it is the hastily scribbled notes I made as he spoke about his and his family’s experiences of that time that make it a particularly special one.

In some ways, my sketchbooks are my practice. When I see them together on a shelf I can think of them as a single evolving work rather than many individual ones. It is something I explore in my latest book, Sketchbook Reveal (Sketcher Press, 2024), which focuses on seven of my sketchbooks from throughout my life.

With social media, we are used to seeing only what the artist considers the best of their work. But sketchbooks are places to push things and experiment, and Sketchbook Reveal reproduces it all, the sketchbook pages that work, and those that don’t, the notes and scribbles, the evolution of my work over time, through drawings of the ups and downs of everyday life.

Although I share my drawings on social media, I’m not concerned if what I do isn’t liked. I’m doing it for myself. I have thought of trying to make a drawing that would get no likes on social media; I can’t help thinking that the sense of liberation that would involve could push me to do something unusual and interesting.

I’m drawn to a degree to the deskilled aesthetic: I’m wary of making anything too neat or tricksy, or telling the full story in visual terms. Using a thick pen in a small sketchbook narrows the options but simultaneously frees things up.

To anyone just setting out with sketchbooks, I’d suggest they enjoy them as a place of experimentation, of visual thinking, as a private space in which to impress nobody except themself. There’s no single, correct way to use a sketchbook, as we all have our own approaches and interests.

They don’t have to be ‘sketches’ for a ‘finished’ work, as their traditional role may once have been. They can be exactly what you want them to be. They are simply bound paper that can be easily kept private because the covers close. They are – literally – a blank page, and that is very exciting to me.

Having said that, I still sometimes feel I don’t quite know what I’m doing. I can have the pen in my hand and the sketchbook open and I think, what now? I should be used to it, but I’m not. I start a drawing, find that it’s not working, do battle with it and try to pull things around, and then abandon it as a failure after a while.

A day or two later I open the sketchbook to see what I did, and more often than not I get a surprise. It’s not the total disaster I imagined at all. Did I do that? How did I do that? Drawing feels precarious and personal. I really don’t know how I do what I do. And that’s fine with me.

Materials

Uniball Posca pens, PC-3M (0.9-1.3mm)

Daler-Rowney A5 and A6 sketchbooks

Seawhite A5 and A6 sketchbooks

Sennelier Indian ink

Procreate software

About James Hobbs

James Hobbs has been based in north London since the 1990s after a childhood in Devon and Cornwall. His work is primarily drawn, often on site using sketchbooks, in a process that can lead to further drawings and digital prints.

James’s work has been exhibited at the Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibition, Rabley Drawing Centre, Wiltshire, the artist-run Skylark Gallery on the South Bank, and a variety of pop-ups and fairs. He has served on the editorial and advisory boards of Urban Sketchers, and helped set up the London Urban Sketchers.

He is the author of four books related to drawing, including Sketchbook Reveal published by Sketcher Press in 2024. Sketch Your World (2014) and Pen and Ink (2016) have been translated into a total of seven languages. James has worked as a journalist for publications that include the Art Newspaper, Artists & Illustrators, and the Guardian.

Follow James on Instagram

Visit James’s website

Further Reading

A Guide to Ink

Posca Pens Are Perfect for Painting

Developing a Daily Drawing Practice with the Royal Drawing School

Inside the Sketchbook of Benjamin Phillips

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