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.