Find insight and inspiration for your creative life. An artist's journal is packed with sketches and captions-some rough, some polished. The margins might spill over with hurriedly scrawled shopping lists and phone numbers. The cover may be travel-worn and the pages warped with watercolors. When you open the book, creativity seeps from each color and line. The intimacy and freedom of its pages are almost like being inside the artist's mind: You get a direct window into risks, lessons, mistakes, and dreams.

The private worlds of these visual journals are exactly what you'll find inside An Illustrated Life. The book offers a sneak peek into the wildly creative imaginations of 50 top illustrators, designers and artists. Included are sketchbook pages from: R. Crumb, Peter Arkle, Brody Neuenschwander, Chistoph Niemann, Cathy Johnson, Chris Ware, James Jean, James Kochalka, and Stefan Sagmeister. The pages of An Illustrated Life are sometimes startling, sometimes endearing, but always inpiring. Wether you're an illustrator, designer, or simply someone searching for a spark, these pages will open a whole new world to you.