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hey you guys welcome back to our channel, the number one place for people who love design art
and all things creative you are watching Dantier and Balogh's channel my name is Laszlo and in
this sketchbook tour video i want to guide you through five years of art and design sketchbooks
in 10 minutes before we begin though i feel like i must warn you
my sketchbooks are actual sketchbooks and they are from a time before art and design became
what we call social media content so i never thought i'm going to show some of these pages
to anyone really what i'm trying to say here is some of these sketchbooks are ugly why sugar coat
it sketchbooks are not mini portfolios they are supposed to be messy and rough you know more on
that later for now let's go chronologically and open up a sketchbook from 2016.
2016 was the year i finished my illustration degree and i don't know if any of you can relate
to this but as soon as i finished and looked around in the creative industries i felt like
my portfolio is nowhere near at the level which i would consider good enough so i pretty much
spent all of that summer just basically making a new portfolio doing a bunch of new illustrations
while everyone else was watching the euro 2016 football matches just like right now our times
don't change sometimes eh these are the sketches that inspire this little science dude drawing
jetpacking himself to outer space then i moved on to sketch out a bunch of street
characters to put together one of the most complex illustrations i've ever done
this cityscape with the girl on the Vespa kids chilling a guy walking his dog
i really just wanted to see how far can i push the body count in one image with this one
then i had this idea of drawing an interior bus scene
for which i made the initial thumbnails and some characters
oh and here's a decent enough sketch to suggest how it would have looked like in the end but to
tell you the truth i've never actually finished this one instead of that i started working on a
bunch of these construction workers which became this space a crazy hectic mess of building
something in london in the rain some animal drawings as well as character portrait practice
native headdresses oh two more construction workers then a film crew for something else
oh yeah then i got really into circus visuals for a bit looking back it feels like all i did in 2016
is put a crazy amount of interesting looking characters together to build illustrations
around them this circus thing i also never got around to do except for this circus owls
i made these onto a pack of stickers then i went to ancient greece i am very much into
antiquity and visuals inspired by history so i wanted to create something mythological
which after some sketching ended up being this lion on the throne inspired by the greek god Zeus
there has never really went further apart from this centaur and the griffin as a wall mural
but yeah that's my point these are just ideas really and you know i don't want to cause
drama and i don't want to name names but every time i see these social posts and videos which
are supposed to be sketchbook tours when it's all filled with finely polished finished beautiful
pieces of artworks i feel like i can genuinely hear my old tutors and teachers echoing in my
head and being like good work but where is the tall process how did you get into this
painting la slow where are the roughs i want to see the roughs i mean maybe it is true some
artists are so good that everything they touch turns into gold and they don't have
mistakes in their sketchbooks but yeah i'm not one of those people and i think striving
to be like that is just unnecessary pressure which you don't need as an aspiring artist
anyway moving on in 2017 i got my first proper illustration commission a guy i knew from
university wanted to self-publish his young adult fantasy book this one and he asked me to draw
some images for it these are the illustrations we ended up with and in this other sketchbook while
there is literally nothing else i would call interesting i got most of the original sketch
work for this project working in this loose way was part laziness and part deliberate as i really
started relying on to this style i just called 90's cartoon style which my work did and still
kinda do resemble with all these thick confident black lines and bold simple color shading yeah
and the rest i can't even make sense of so i'm not gonna bore you with it next now this this
is the big guns i usually have a couple different sketchbooks running at any given time but i tend
to have a favorite one and between 2018 and 2020 this grey one was my main book here are some herbs
and spices which ended up looking like this and winning me a young creative network award not to
brag then these are some character sketches for a commission which ended up looking like this some
pattern work and oh this is interesting this is the drawing of myself I did this thing for my old
website around 2018 i started to realize that you can't really be a successful creative unless you
do put yourself out there literally and utilizing social media so i did this little about the artist
kind of thing it's a long way away from taking the step to make youtube videos but in a way
i kinda think that this was the first step into that direction some messing around ah then tintin
this one had developed into final illustration and these two as well on the left is blondie hanging
on the telephone piece i did for a competition which i didn't win then this mermaid with the
escape artist also for a competition which i also didn't win oh and this captain on a burning ship
for a competition which of course i have not won actually let's just take a second let me just
say that my opinion on illustration competitions have changed quite a lot since i drew all these
pieces illustration competitions in my experience rarely get you the exposure you're hoping for when
you're entering them i did a lot of these in the past i even won some but entering them or even
winning them didn't magically make me a famous illustrator so yeah think twice before you make
some free work for one of these competition kind of things and think even harder if they want you
to pay an entry fee for a competition okay some random drawings and as we moving on you can kind
of see me switching gears from illustration to logo and graphic design work in this book lots of
icon concepts branding bits and bobs some of them speculative some of them real stuff oh wait a sec
here's the first sketch for lemon and jinja one of my favorite branding projects i've worked on
funny that okay you know what that's done let's move on to everyone's favorite year the year 2020
i started this bulky old sketchbook last year and now it's my main ideation workhorse when it
comes to anything creative really of course last year was the year we have started this channel
as well so in this book there is a lot of stuff you might recognize if you have been following
us for a while besides early versions of youtube video scripts you would find the sketch works for
hoplite gymnasium a logo project i have talked about last year or these roughs for my christmas
logo i think ever since i shifted to brand design from illustration my sketchbooks got even messier
and crazier as time went on as a result but that's just the nature of the job oftentimes these days i
would find myself working on something very simple you know typographic exercises and sometimes i
feel like i need to just quickly rough these out and test them out to see if an idea works or not
here's some floral explanation for an icon i have designed last year oh then this is pretty
cool some typographic exploration for someone's 50th birthday this was quite an exercise for me
as typography and hand lettering is a job within itself not my main area of expertise
but you know i dabble into it then we have this more classic folky icon sketches for a national
part which ended up looking like this i think this was for a competition which i did not win
there are some sketches here which i did for youtube videos here i was messing about with
character design i basically combined two different star wars characters to
get something new i didn't really know what i was doing in terms of video editing back
then but if you want to have a good laugh i'll link the video here some other video
related content here like this batman sketch which i developed into a movie poster oh and
here are the initial sketches for our christmas themed ios 14 icon pack gosh last year i was busy
yeah since i'm still using this sketchbook there is some unpublished stuff here which
i can't talk about just yet so let's keep these for now
oh and here are the plans for the prismatic postage branding project i have done recently
i made a video about that one if you want to know more about that icon
is that it oh no no before i forget here's the little one from the thumbnail
this is my little Grail Diary this was a gift from Jacqueline a couple years ago actually and
i gotta say it's one of the coolest nicest looking objects i own in a
weird way i rarely actually use it because i really don't want to fill this out you know
like ever i just want to carry this in my bag for the rest of my days and document
you know my adventures i got some copywriting exercises here and some very very quick logo
sketches i've probably done on half a day long cross-country bus journeys which i used to take
i got loads more sketchbooks i could talk about but i feel like we must hit the 10 minute mark
around now aren't we yeah usually there is a moral of the story kind of sections in
my videos i'm not sure i got one of those for this one ugly sketchbooks matter too or better
yet ugly sketchbook beautiful final work however there is a takeaway guys if you enjoy this kind
of content feel free to join our creative crew we aim to give you two videos every week about
illustration graphics interior design architecture all those cool things and everything in between
as always leave a like if you enjoyed this one and i hope to see you this time next week bye