In the previous post, illustrator and children's book author Steve Light told how his mentor, Dave Passalacqua at Pratt Institute, taught his art students to make their own inspiration books. Here Steve describes his own take on this technique for sparking creativity:

For my inspiration books, I discovered these small inexpensive Kolo Vineyard paper albums and devised my own portable and lightweight system that works really well for me. When I buy a new Kolo Vineyard, I take the ribbon right out. I don’t need it; these books aren't for show, they're workhorses for my own reference, and I when I grab one I want to be able to access the images in them quickly. I used to keep them altogether in a leather envelope, but now when I'm leaving the apartment, I grab a couple to work from, and just slide ‘em under the elastic of my Moleskine notebook to hold everything together inside my bag, and I'm good to go.

At first I made a few general inspiration books. I just made reduced color copies of a variety of pictures of art that I liked and glued them, miniaturized, into a couple Kolo Vineyard albums. Then, like Terry Gilliam (see previous post), I started making inspiration books for specific projects, and my collection grew and grew. It's like having my entire art library shrunken down into an efficient, convenient mini volume set.

Usually I'm just working with a couple of these books at a time, but when I go on a long trip, I bring 'em all with me -- they weigh nothing and take up so little space that it's a no-brainer.

I use Kolo Vineyard albums (the small 5"x7" version) in a variety of colors so that I can quickly identify the book that I want. Sometimes I tape the spine to help to differentiate them from one another when I have more than one book of the same color.

Some of the inside pages of Steve Light’s inspiration books, with images of art that he finds inspirational, will appear on Koloist later this week.

This project and many others can be seen on Ugo's Flickr page here.

Artist Steve Light’s Kolo Vineyard paper albums are his workbooks. He doesn’t care that they’re dog-eared and worn – he likes ‘em that way. He tosses ‘em in his bag and carries ‘em with him everywhere. He calls them his “inspiration books" and he says they help jump-start him to do his best work. He refined his system over time, as he explains:

At Pratt Institute I was a student of the late great Dave Passalacqua. He taught his students to look at works by other artists while we work -- not to copy them, but to be inspired by them. And he showed us a practical method for doing that -- inspiration books.

On the old laser disk version of the movie Adventures of Baron Munchausen, there was a special feature that Dave showed his students because he wanted us to see the “inspiration book” that the filmmaker Terry Gilliam had made for himself. Gilliam would refer to his inspiration book often as he was creating the film. It was full of contextual stuff… a scrapbook of visual examples of things he’d collected that had the look and feel that he wanted his movie to have. To see how Gilliam's inspiration book obviously fueled his creativity for his film was a great lesson.

Dave Passalacqua used to show us a lot of art books and stamp books. He taught us to make our own inspiration books filled with stamps and postcards, because so many are miniature examples of great art, and because they’re so small you can see a lot of ‘em at once with several together on a page. So we made our own inspiration books -- just photocopies of stuff we liked that we would three-hole punch and put into three-ring binders.

It was a great idea, but those books started to get big and cumbersome. I live in Manhattan and I like to keep mobile. I draw everywhere -- in cafes and parks, in museums and in my classroom in the morning before my students arrive, so carrying those heavy three-ring binders around wasn’t practical…

Circle back to Koloist later to see more about Steve Light’s inspiration books.

Happy to point out that a biography and picture of Steve Light now appears on Koloist. Just click on his name under “Contributors” in the right-hand sidebar of this page.

A sampling of other cool projects Steve Light has posted on Koloist can be seen here, here and here.