On keeping a shared sketchbook

A year ago, my partner and I bought a sketchbook with the simple intention of drawing together. Most of our relationship has included this kind of collaborative artistic play— whether it be drawing, painting, making cyanotypes, taking film photos or Polaroids, or experimenting with Polaroid transfers. For the most part, these kinds of projects came naturally to us— meaning that we didn't think much about where the art was going, if it was informing our individual practices, or whether it could be categorized as "serious" art. To put it simply, we did it because it was fun.

I believe we bought the shared sketchbook with the same intention. But over the course of the year, new intentions formed as we contributed to it together. We learned a lot about ourselves and each other through the process of sharing the object and the vision for what it would become.

The beginning was explosive. We captured everything. We kept scores of the games we played together, made collages with wrappers from our favorite candy, drew scenes from movies we loved and hated, pasted in concert tickets and plane tickets, filled pages with stickers we collected along our adventures, and much more.

There's a chocolate store a couple blocks from my apartment that we started going to together when I first moved to a new neighborhood in LA. We'd each pick one chocolate bar we thought we'd like, bring them home, try each other's, give them a rating, and then collage the packaging into the sketchbook. Those pages are collaged with wrappers, along with our thoughts and scores.

We watched Fantastic Four and Superman within a couple months of each other that year, and my partner made this drawing where all the Fantastic Four characters and Superman and his dog, Krypto, were together in the same scene. That's the kind of thing that kept showing up— drawings that came from what we were experiencing together, remixed and made into something new.

Another page has a drawing of my partner's dog, Ursa. I was sitting at the kitchen table, and I drew her as quickly as I could while she sat next to me. She had a sweet gentle energy that I tried to capture, though I have to admit that I added a description underneath the drawing that read "Ursa! Goddess of jealousy and chunk", which I will let you interpret for yourself. Ursa passed away a few months after I created that drawing. After she passed, I drew her again on a new page farther along in the sketchbook but this time the description simply said "Rest in peace Ursa".

Because we don't live together, the time my partner and I spend together still carries a certain weight. It's precious, and we feel that. When the weekend starts, there's a mutual desire to use it well— and the sketchbook became part of how we did that. If I was cooking lunch, my partner might be drawing in the sketchbook at the table. Or if he was handling something, I'd be the one drawing. We were almost immediately faced with negotiations around who would draw and when, and by the end of Sunday, the sketchbook had to go home with someone.

What became most noticeable to me at a certain point wasn't what was going in the book but when we were choosing to add to it. That realization came pretty quickly. The early days were prolific— we were excited, drawing constantly, filling pages with whatever came to mind, but as the sketchbook started traveling back and forth between our apartments, patterns emerged. Sometimes we drew together, sometimes solo but near each other, and other times we drew privately.

Drawing Together

I loved the slow morning ritual of opening the sketchbook and drawing together while we ate breakfast. Sometimes we'd sit silently listening to music, quietly sketching. Other times we'd be joking around and laughing at whatever we were creating. The pages that have one drawing that I can tell was created upside-down and another right-side-up on the same page are some of my favorites. They're evidence of time spent together.

One page I remember well is a dream house. We'd been talking about what we'd want if we ever bought a house, and we started drawing it together— a house with a river flowing in front of it, a garden, surrounded by trees. My partner drew right-side-up, handling the architecture, the windows, the structure of the building. I drew upside-down from the other side of the table— the trees, the sky, the river. We were building the same place from opposite directions, and the drawing holds both of our perspectives at once.

Drawing Solo (But Near Each Other)

These moments offered a different kind of intimacy. They were the nights where one person might be cooking dinner while the other sat at the table drawing, or when one person read a book aloud while the other listened and drew. I appreciate this quiet way of connecting— two different activities happening in parallel but deeply connected.

One of my favorite pages is from when we were in Ireland. My partner was reading The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw aloud while I drew my own interpretation of the book's cover. I look at that drawing and I'm transported back to that bed and breakfast in the Irish countryside, listening to his voice after a few long travel days. This is one of the many memories I'm grateful our sketchbook holds.

Drawing Privately

These pages have an element of surprise inherent in them— an intentional way of communicating. I noticed that whenever we drew something without the other person knowing, we'd almost never tell each other. We'd wait for them to discover it on their own.

I also found it interesting how we negotiated time with the sketchbook. Sometimes one of us would say, "Hey, I've had the sketchbook for a while, you should keep it for a bit." That meant the person handing it over would soon have new sweet, loving, silly, stupid drawings waiting to be discovered. I love making that unspoken promise to each other.

Both sides of this exchange were exciting. When I was the one keeping the sketchbook, it was fun to think about what I could draw that might make my partner laugh, or make him feel seen and loved, or impress him with something rendered really well. When he was the one to take it home, the anticipation was different— I knew he probably drew something, but I almost never knew what it was going to be. It was always something connected to our experience together, pulled from what was happening in our lives at the time. I loved the cleverness of what he chose to draw, and how beautifully they were rendered.

A few pages that were drawn by my partner when we were not together were dedicated to lemons. Sometime in the fall, when the weather got a little colder in LA, we started making lemon cookies with lemon icing. We made those cookies several times throughout the fall and winter, and when Christmas time came around, we thought it appropriate to buy a lemon-shaped Christmas ornament. We joked that 2025 was the year of the lemon. We had our sour moments: the LA fires, Ursa passing away, moving challenges, and much more. Though, instead of making lemonade, we kept making cookies.

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The biggest thread I see when I look through our book is a passion for capturing the memories of our relationship. At some point, we both acknowledged the importance of making sure certain events were documented. There was no rigidity in how they were depicted, but we both felt inspired to make sure they were in there somewhere.

That acknowledgment was never really a conversation. It was more of a pattern we both noticed— major life events kept showing up in the book without either of us declaring that they should. Occasionally we'd open the sketchbook and realize something was missing. Someone would say, "Oh hey, we didn't make anything for that trip we went on," and that would be enough to ignite the impulse to create something. It wasn't an agreement we made. It was a pattern we recognized, and something we corrected after the fact when we realized a piece of our story hadn't made it in yet.

I love that a year of our relationship is captured in pages of in-depth chocolate reviews, game scores, and drawings of lemon-shaped Christmas ornaments. A year ago it felt like holding possibilities. Now I hold our story in a beat-up, warped, bright yellow book that has traveled to Washington, London, Ireland, and all around Los Angeles. We're on book two now, and we've jokingly agreed to fill at least eleven pages a month to finish it by the end of 2026.

We'll see what happens.

More soon,
Kevin

A selection of our sketchbook pages are shown below: