peek inside my sketchbook

Keeping a sketchbook is an integral part of Ellen's art practice, and simply also just one of her most favorite ways to stay grounded through life. As a child of diary culture, Ellen has always kept an artistic journal of some sort. Lately she uses her sketchbook to document moments and people to savor their presence and capture their likeness. Her sketchbook keeps Ellen playful, sentimental, and expansive. Often when Ellen feels a creative block she will fill a page in her sketchbook for the duration of one song, and see where it brings her image by it's end. Her sketchbook is a place of meditation, offering a vessel for which to synch eye, mind and hand into flow.

 

These qualities show themselves in all of Ellen's sketchbooks she has held throughout her life: from the sisterhood-of-the-traveling-pants-like notebooks she and her dear childhood friends kept together as they grew up,  to her current day professional and personal sketchbooks. Included here is a selection of various sketchbook moments.