Sketchbookery
My new favourite sketchbook hack!
Back in July, I was wrestling with the annual conundrum:
I want to take art materials on my camping holiday, so I can do some art if the mood strikes.
But I always take far too much - and space is limited, with things like our actual shelter for three weeks needing to fit in the car too. Every item we take has to justify its place.
I end up frustrated and cross when my art things end up in a muddled heap in the tent, because it’s hard to keep things tidy when there’s just too much for a small space. The worst is spending time I’d rather be on the beach, packing it all up to squeeze it back into the car for the return trip.
I spend the holiday with a nagging feeling of guilt for not using even a fraction of it - and also stupid, because it’s all self-inflicted pain. I never learn.
The cherry on top is feeling sad - because I haven’t made any art, or at least, not as much as I’d hoped to. Why? Because too much choice creates creative paralysis. And the hardest choice is which sketchbook to even start using, for all the usual reasons.
You’ll not be surprised to learn I detest anything that smacks of ‘compromise’ - but I needed to at least attempt to take a little less.
Which is why mere hours before packing the car and departing for the ferry, I absolutely needed to wreck my studio just a little bit more. Pulling out drawers and packs of paper, delving deep for any piece of stiff card or mountboard I could find, swiping aside the piles of crap on my desk to clear a space for a cutting board, pot of glue, masking tape…and tipping out the contents of my ‘haberdashery’ basket and jewellery-making findings box in the hunt for the jolly colours of elastic cord, that I knew were somewhere about the place…
Think ‘traveller’s notebook’ but DIY
You’ve probably seen them - a simple cover with sets of elastic straps to hold a notebook. Cost a fortune, never had a ‘real’ one, but I’ve made them - hence the collection of elastic cords in the stash.
I honestly can’t remember where I saw the idea of creating a sketchbook in the same style, but something told me it was the answer to all my sketchbook problems:
Which book to take? Doesn’t matter, maybe take one and add to it as you go along - or take some spare elastic and make more when you’re there!
What kind of paper? Anything you like, add it as you go
Which size sketchbook is more portable for beach sketching? Irrelevant - the pages can be taken out individually to fit in a pencil case, folded if necessary
How many pages? Are there enough? Not even a question - add as many as will fit.
Too ‘nice’ to use so I’ll be scared to start? Nope! It’s only a bit of spare cardboard and elastic and the pages are completely removable for discrete disposal into the recycling if it all goes wrong. Doesn’t even have to be ‘quality’ cardboard - plain old corrugated cardboard from a box would work. It just has to be stiff enough to hold the elastic without pulling inwards, and protect the pages.
The only thing I had to decide up front was what size
I went with somewhere between A5 and A6 (when closed). My reasoning was that my biggest source of loose paper is a big stash of cartridge paper (Seawhite, if you’re asking); a piece of A4 rips in half to A5, which is A6 when folded - and A6 fits easily into a plastic pencil case or a pocket. Also, tourist leaflets tend to be A4, so they could be ripped in half to create more pages.
And of course, everybody loves a fat sketchbook, so an extra centimetre or more added to the total width allows for a spine - which allows for a great wodge of paper plus collage. And that’s about as scientific as it got.
How to make a low-risk sketchbook
Cut card to double the width of the cover size you want, plus extra to allow for a spine. The height is less important - so perhaps just a bit taller than the height of your pages.
Measure half way along the width, top and bottom - then mark two lines either side, to create the spine. Make sure whatever you have left either side for the front/back covers are also a little oversized (so in my case, slightly wider than A6) to allow for that fat sketchbook effect where the page edges all stick out a little bit more when there’s a lot of them bunched together. There’s probably a technical term for this, but I’m sure you know what I mean.
Use a craft knife to score (don’t cut all the way through!!) the two lines for the spine, then bend the card carefully to open up these shallow cuts.
Spread PVA (white) glue into each cut, to add some flexibility and strength.
Cover over this PVA-glued spine with masking tape - to cover dodgy glueing but also add more strength and make things look neat and tidy.
Cut elastic cord to fit around the spine, then knot it into loops - with at least a couple of loops per cardboard cover. That way, you don’t have to wedge all your papers into one loop - several loops helps things stay tighter, with less of that ‘escaping edges’ phenomenon.
Voilà! You now have a completely dull cardboard sketchbook cover which you can stuff full of any old paper you like.
Why this works
It’s cheap, it’s boring, it’s just a bit of old card. What’s the worst thing that could happen?
Take pages out if you hate them - or if you want to work on them one at a time. Add more in, use whatever paper you like. Magazine pages, junk mail, old painted papers, old artwork. They don’t even have to be the same size. Perhaps create pages out of grocery packaging (spot the tinned tomato cardboard wrapper below). Take pages out to stitch on them, or paint them - then put them back in. Separate the growing bundles into ‘finished’ and ‘need some more work’…and so on.
And I can safely say, that this is the MOST I’ve ever done in a holiday ‘sketchbook’ EVER!! I used two covers, and constantly rotated pages between them - finished/less finished; ones to go down to the beach, collages pages taken out and left to dry all over the tent floor (a warm tent is a marvellous environment for drying things).
I haven’t finished - but now I have a new conundrum. It’s not quite the same doing this sort of thing when you get home again. The vibe, the mood is different…I’ll have to take it all back again next time I go camping, and carry on!
Enjoy this little flick through my collection of pages:
Let me know if you give this a whizz!
Until next time,
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Love this sketchbook and what you’ve done in it. Like you I’m a lot freer (is that a word) when it’s not an expensive sketchbook!! Less pressure .
This is a great idea. Thank you. And to build a little on what you said, I bought a small sketchbook with the inside cover set up with a small pocket and elastic across which holds a set of pencil crayons. If you want to go small, this is ideal, I think. Your posts are always so interesting and this one touched me on the mention of a fancy sketchbook being too precious to use. I have a whole collection of fancy notebooks that I never use. Can't resist buying them though. LOL!