Sketchbooks

Kudos to WordPress for updating their media manager! It’s not super easy to 1) get pictures in a gallery to fit nicely together, and 2) link to the same photo from multiple galleries. That’s a great improvement, because before you had to attach an image to have it in a gallery, and it could only be attached to one post at a time.

Anyway, continuing from my last Iconology post… in the course of an IM conversation with my father, I realized that part of the reference from the iconology letter was at least partly lost on him (and by extension some others, perhaps), because he didn’t have a very clear idea of what DaVinci’s sketchbooks were like, nor any sketchbook incorporating images and text interwoven. This post aims to address that.

That’s a page from DaVinci’s sketchbook on the top left. It’s very cool. It’s also something that I have no intention whatever of replicating. What is he writing about? I have no idea. Why is he sketching babies waiting to be born? Presumably because he was a naturalist, with a strong interest in the human body. Did he have to find a new baby who’s mother died to get this? I’d prefer not to speculate.

Above is an image from William Blake’s sketchbook, which I found somewhere some time ago, and thought pretty cool. It does’t include any text at present, but it’s probably an illustration. He usually illustrated his own poems, which is also awfully cool. The context for this one must surely be pretty epic. Here’s another of Blake’s illustrations, just because it’s also pretty cool, in a far cozier way. And below is a spread from Guillermo Del Torro’s sketchbook, just because it’s cool.