Preface: (in rtf-format)

Picture makes us happy
A sketch captures the essential. It is striking. It does not have to woo, it charms with its genuineness. A sketch is the axe of creative work. You can liberally draft ideas and cut the useless ones to pieces. A sketch is a thought which has quickly taken the form of a drawing like a generous promise without the burden of fulfilment. A sketch is where the thoughts set forth. It is full of opportunities. It is not a masterpiece meant to be published or a perfect portrayer of its creator’s know-how and creative ability.
   A sketchbook is filled with wild ideas and crazy visions. It is a data bank which stores all the phases of sketching. It overflows with various compositions, styles and colour combinations. At the same time it can also be a notebook and a book of an artist. The interface of a sketchbook is perfect. It is possible to draw in a sketchbook even while standing up and without power supply or computer mouse. Sketchbook stores the sketches and keeps them in order, the wind cannot blow them away. It does not disappear in the bottom drawers of filing cabinets or cannot be lost in cyber space. It is at the reach of the hand on a book shelf where it preserves its functionality forever. You grab a book and in a split second you’ll have a horn of plenty to save your creative process at deadlock.
  Every designer should accept the flaws in their drawing skills and explore their minds. A sketchbook is an extremely personal training camp where you do not have to fear your ”opponent” laughing at you. It releases the blocks and removes the fear of blank paper. A picture does not have to be a reflection of dull everyday life. Imagination can make real life exciting and full of life. Playing with fluid ink and colours on a coloured base produces inspirational results. It is liberating to smudge and smear. You tell more stories by exaggerating and simplifying things than by reproducing factual world. A sketchbook is filled with moving stories and funny jokes. It can help you deal with your own emotions. There is an entire living world in a two-dimensional picture.
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My own enthusiasm for sketchbooks dates back to my childhood. At the age of four I started to draw in the sketchbooks my father had bound. Sketchbooks became even more significant when I was studying graphic design. It gave my drawing new opportunities of expression and was a helpful tool in graphic design process. Finally it helped me find my own personal mode of expression as an illustrator. Over the years I have gathered tens of sketchbooks I have bound myself.
  I was asked to teach a freehand drawing course in January 2000. Since the beginning my course has been based on sketchbooks which are hand-bound and sewn together from various papers. After the second sketchbook based freehand drawing course we set up a site on our school web pages where we introduced pictures created during the course. Since there was no other visual material on our site, people outside the university got an impression that the pages represented our idea of visual expression. Thanks to those people who were unaware of our course, concepts such as “taiktyyli” (style of University of Art and Design Helsinki) and ”tussihuoraaminen” (childish felt tip drawing) were introduced.
  I encouraged people to try out inexpensive pens and felt tips in addition to art tools. Colourful and naïve sketches drawn with “pound shop tools” did not please all the visitors of our website. Colours and contrasts, expressions and figures, movement and line, space and composition, they all have an effect on us regardless of the filing quality of pigments and papers. What makes a book unique is in fact the abundance of material.
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This book introduces 357 sketchbook pictures made by 41 graphic design students in this millennium. The pictures have been selected by a jury of six students and myself. The selection criteria were aesthetic originality and the variety of techniques. The aim was to get a comprehensive sample of the abundant sketchbook material (55 books, about 9 000 pictures). The book is divided into sections by three interleafs. Six panoramic pictures from our freehand drawing course have been printed on them, you access their 3D world on our website: www.graafinen.org/sketchbook.
  The common denominator for the pictures in the book is that they are not meant to be published. They do not represent the illustration styles of their creators but their sketchbooks. The chosen picture might be a side product created in the quest for individual style of expression. The picture might have been created in a few seconds or it might have been worked on for several days. It might have been created at school, in one’s leisure time at home or while travelling. The pictures radiate the feeling of freedom, spontaneity and lack of authoritarian pressure.

26 October 2007 Sakke Yrjölä