5 Scrapbook Art Websites to Inspire Your Illustration Projects

These attractive websites will show you ways to use scrapbook art in a professional and artistic way

Nuria Meléndez (@nuriamelworkshop) is a Mexican designer, illustrator, and scrapbook lover. She has created work for children's and young adult literature, cultural magazines, musical projects, theaters, and museums. She has worked for publishers such as Penguin Random House and establishments such as The Mexico City Museum and UNAM. She loves working on projects that involve play, collecting, and transforming as part of the creative process. She uses illustration, collage, and other craft techniques combined with two of her favorite concepts: transformation and nostalgia through scrapbooking.

In her Domestika course, Nuria helps you create an illustration scrapbook by finding new ways to stimulate your creativity and experiment with cutouts, and allowing you to find new ways to express your imagination. Nuria lists five websites where you will find tips and ideas to ensure that your scrapbooks turn into incredible treasures. Let’s have a look at them in detail below.

Edward Bawden

Nuria’s first website is the personal scrapbook of mid-century English painter, illustrator, and graphic artist Edward Bawden. This website is a unique and personal window into the mid-century art world. The artist created his beloved scrapbooks using all types of material: postcards, telegrams, and letters from friends, as well as sketches and private view cards.
He collected, arranged, and pasted them over 55 years and created five beautiful scrapbooks full of ephemera.

John L. Ridgway

This is a beautiful scrapbook compiled by the American scientific illustrator, who worked alongside his ornithologist brother. You can view all pages of the scrapbook on the website. It is made up of 69 pages of exquisite drawings and proof prints depicting birds, bones, and small still life objects with hand-written notes.

Ray Yoshida

Comic books positively influenced the work of this American painter and collagist. The web page’s scrapbook includes comic book clippings, newspaper comic strips, and advertising, all organized in themes.

New Kids on the Block, Hitler, and Bob Dylan: artist scrapbook

"Long before artisans turned scrapbooking into a billion-dollar industry, everyone from William Burroughs to Gerhard Richter used them as little canvases to work on their ideas." The article from the Guardian newspaper, which advertised a major exhibition of scrapbooks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, includes inspiring samples from different creatives.

"See the Scrapbooks of Noted Creatives, from Cecil Beaton to Wendell Castle"

This article published in Introspective Magazine invites us to peek into the inspirations and artistic processes enclosed in great designers’ scrapbooks. Among them, design giant Wendell Castle, celebrity photographer and costume and set designer Cecil Beaton, and enterprising decorators David Hicks and Charlotte Moss, using scrapbooks to seek inspiration, study compositions, and creatively document events.

If you want to learn how to use scrapbooking as a creative reference tool for your illustration projects, sign up for Nuria’s course, Creating an Illustrated Scrapbook, and start building your first illustration scrapbook step by step using a series of experimental cutting exercises.

You may be interested in:

- What is Collage, And How Has It Evolved?
- Junk Journal July: A Creativity Challenge
- How to Find Images When Creating a Digital Collage