Inside my sketchbook

Wanted to share some of the pages from my sketchbook with you guys! One day I hope to make a video touring the entire thing, but despite having had this particular sketchbook since December 2021 it is nowhere near finished. Here's some lil details about each page!

1.) aestheno!
This is the closest you guys are going to see to the concept art for the current album. It's not even for the current album really, more like for the aestheno brand as a whole. But in some ways it fits some of the imagery I've collected for the current album. I like to do these collage-y pages, where I paint the background and then stick paper on top with the rest of the image. I hand drew a copy of the aestheno text logo and coloured it in marker, and the aestheno was painted in acrylic with the shading supplemented by marker (I do this a lot too). I use gold pen a lot in my art, and the golden lightning bolts just made the whole thing. I love this page sooo much

2.) Character doodles
Other than the Geos in the bottom left and top right corners, everyone else on this page is a character of some sort, including Sett and Ezreal from League. This whole page is done in marker, and I think I'd missed doing that. Back in the day I used to only colour in markers, so it was just a fun little page to play with colours.

3.) Geo/aestheno page
More marker pens again. I'm not really sure what this page was for, I was just exploring cool little ways to characterise aestheno. I was definitely listening to a lot of Grimes at the time (and was reading Dune lol) which is why the two on the left had such fantasy vibes.

4.) idk who this guy is
When you use alcohol-based markers in a sketchbook, they bleed through the paper, so I oftentimes like to cover the back side of those pages up with something else. In this case I stuck in a couple of sheets of a Korean newspaper I had lying around and painted over them. The second sheet is still blank, and I don't know what this little guy is, but he's kinda cool.

5.) More aestheno??
In my other sketchbook/journal that I carry around with me wherever i go, I'd done a drawing with a design for an on-stage outfit for an aestheno performance, which was this leotard-type thing with the lightning bolts down the side. I decided to try and draw a more dynamic pose in this sketchbook with the same thing. It looks kind of goofy, but the monochrome vibe with only yellow on the page kinda goes hard. It's just a shame there was some marker bleed on the page at a later date.

6.) LA and a wave
I did the little inset painting of LA - it actually took a while to finish as when I first drew it I couldn't be bothered to paint it, so I left it. But when it was finished, I thought it looked lonely on the page, so I decided to fill the background. The wave is a little Hokusai-esque, but it isn't a transposition or supposed to look like a Hokusai piece. I painted in watercolour and just hoped it would look cool by the time I'd finished. I think the cool dark splodges on the wave really made the painting, and those were a sort of 'fuck it we ball' decision that just kind of worked out.

7.) POP page
I'm not sure who the women I drew are but I wanted a colour-coordinated page with the little cut-outs of POP magazine covers. Those were from the POP 50th edition which came out earlier this year, and I bought it because I was in love with the cover photo of Kylie Jenner (I wouldn't consider myself her fan, but the creative direction of that shoot was sublime). POP is a really big magazine, and I cherish its place on my shelf and really engaged in it for a lot of inspiration. Plus, I get to have the hottest woman in the world (Gisele Bundchen) in my sketchbook, so that's cool.

8.) City sunset
This was an idea that I had in my head and just hoped it would look cool. Again, the page is painted in black and everything else is stuck on top. I drew all the lines of perspective out to get the buildings right and just desperately hoped it wouldn't look like utter shit. I think it looks pretty cool, even if somewhat simplistic. I like filling my sketchbook with interesting looking pages, so it did its job.

9.) Go Canucks go!
Mini Canucks Geo ft a drawing of a pylon, need I say more??