Hooked Rugs as Sketches 101

Series 2 Wildflowers, 10" x 47", #5- to 8-cut hand-dyed wool on linen, unfinished.  The wildflowers are hooked first, and the unhooked linen background is later cut away from the hooked surface, leaving exposed raw edges of hooking.  Designed and hooked by Michelle Sirois-Silver, Vancouver, Canada, 2006. 

Sketchbooks are commonly considered a tool for those who work with oil paints, charcoal, and pastels, but don’t overlook the use of a sketchbook as it applies to other art forms—especially rug hooking.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), an Edo period artist well known for his series of block prints titled Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, was the first artist to use the term manga, meaning “playful sketches” or “light feeling,” to describe his humorous block print images, which were published as a fifteen-volume manga sketchbook series.

This article is from the January/February 2012 issue. For more information on our issues, check out our issues page.