Sketchbook #145 - Nothing is more personal than a brush stroke

I love drawing in my sketchbook. When I think about it, it’s incredible how much time I’ve spent drawing traditionally, even if the results have often been slow to appear.

In 2014, I moved to Paris with the idea of settling down and working remotely after years of traveling around the world. At that time, driven by my desire to explore the world of concept art for film and television, I decided to return to fine art school. My background was mostly rooted in photography and heavily focused on 3D-based design, but I felt the need to go back to the basics — to refine and strengthen my fundamentals.

That journey into traditional work never left me. Despite the daily use of technology in my professional life, it gradually became more and more important in my artistic path.

The struggle, the frustration, but also the passion that fuels the discipline required to show up every day eventually became almost addictive to me.

I can hardly express how difficult this journey has been, especially for someone like me, who sometimes feels as though he was born with no natural predisposition for it. And yet, at the same time, it has also become a form of therapy — a space of silence, honesty, and meaningful hard work where I can slowly find myself again, stroke after stroke.

Sketchbook #342

Pages of studies from my sketchbook

Sketchbook #234

Pages from my sketchbook, studies

Sketchbook #13

Pages from my sketchbook, practicing using various media

Sketchbook #235 Human forms

Pages from my sketchbook, old studies of human forms.

Anatomy studies from books, from Masters, combining techniques, feeding the passion that keeps me going through continuous failure and random micro successes

Sketchbook #157

Pages from my sketchbook, places.

Sometimes I’m lucky enough to find myself alone in a place I like, without distractions or family around. Those moments are ideal for starting a quick on-location sketch: improvised, direct, and rarely good :) or fully “finished” state (what does “finished” even mean for a sketch?).

Other times I’ll just capture the spirit of a place through a few lines and shapes, and bring a photo back to the studio to further refine — or, more honestly, to reinterpret and push it a bit further. Some of these pages also include studies from master works;
I often alternate between studying from others and drawing from observation, with the aim of absorbing what I learn and re-expressing it through my own hand. Much simpler said than done… but we’re still here.

Sketchbook #72 - Gouache and my bad brain

I think one of the main obstacles in art — at least in the way I experienced it — is the overwhelming number of tools available, and how collecting fine art materials can easily become a real addiction.

Experimentation is important, of course. It’s part of finding what resonates with you, discovering your preferences, and slowly developing your own visual language. But I also realized that, for me, it often became a form of procrastination.
We are constantly bombarded by advertisements and exposed online to incredible artists creating extraordinary work with every possible tool imaginable. It becomes easy to believe that by buying the same materials, somehow we might also become capable of producing the same kind of work.

That is insecurity speaking — the quiet voice convincing you that the next tool will finally unlock something in you.
For a long time, I believed it over and over again.
So I accumulated enough materials to fill an entire store, only to slowly realize how deceptive that mindset could be. Little by little, I began reducing my tools drastically and focusing instead on process, repetition, and attention.

There was also a period in the past when I experimented extensively with gouache and watercolor. These are some very old studies from life or masters — the few that, as usual, did not end up in the fireplace…. imagine the others….