The sketchbook is the least ceremonious object in a working studio and the one that does the most. It is where a shape is tested before it costs anything, where a tide time and a wind direction get written next to the drawing they explain, and where a painter or a potter finds, months later, the note that makes a piece possible. Nothing in it is meant to be shown, which is exactly why it stays honest.
This section treats the sketchbook as a working record rather than a display piece. It covers what a page actually holds when the weather is bad, the margin systems that make a year of field notes findable again, how pages turn into studio work without being copied, and how a daily habit stays useful once the novelty wears off. The discipline described here is the same one the kiln log and the press notebook rely on.
