Mattias Adolfsson's sketchbooks
A Swedish illustrator posts pages from his sketchbooks almost daily: ink, watercolour and whole cities packed with tiny details.
What it is
Mattias Adolfsson is a Swedish illustrator based in Sigtuna, just outside Stockholm. He works on newspapers, children's books and video games, but what made his name is his personal sketchbook art. His Instagram is essentially that sketchbook made public: a fresh page of ink and watercolour turns up in the feed almost every day.
Why we picked it
Adolfsson fills every inch of the page. He starts from something familiar, a village street, a church interior, a cluttered desk, and then crowds it with eccentric characters, smoking Rube Goldberg contraptions, tower houses and absurdly complicated spacesuits. You can spend ten minutes on one spread and still find something new: someone fixing a chimney, someone napping on a roof, someone pushing a cart that holds another cart.
He mostly draws in heavy watercolour sketchbooks, and the feed often shows a page moving from pencil layout to finished colour. If you keep a sketchbook yourself, it's a practical lesson in holding a composition together when there are hundreds of details, without the drawing going stiff. Over the years the individual pages have grown into a single world with its own recurring characters, so it's worth scrolling a long way back.
Where to start
- Full-spread posts, where the density of detail really shows.
- Process videos and sequences, from pencil sketch to watercolour.
- His towns and interiors, the most recognisable part of the sketchbooks.
- The book "Mattias Unfiltered: The Sketchbook Art of Mattias Adolfsson" from BOOM! Studios, a collection of sketchbook pages.
- His earlier collections "First in Line" and "Second in Line" if you want the work on paper.
Who it's for
Anyone who draws or keeps meaning to start a sketchbook, illustrators looking for a fresh take on detail, and people who simply enjoy pictures where something is happening in every corner. Kids like these pages too: each one is a ready-made spot-the-detail game.
Quick answers
Who is Mattias Adolfsson? A Swedish illustrator who works for publishers, newspapers and studios, and fills sketchbooks with extraordinarily detailed drawings in his own time.
What does he draw with? Mostly ink and watercolour, in sketchbooks with heavy paper that can take water.
Are his sketchbooks published? Yes. "Mattias Unfiltered" collects pages from his sketchbooks.
