New Sketchbooks!

With the advent of the my last term in school, I’ve started a pair of new sketchbooks.  One is a Moleskine cahier brown-cover that I customized, for school-related sketches and notes, and the other was one I handmade as my first experiment in bookbinding.  Its purpose is to record a series of drawings for my traditional illutrsation class, and the theme I’ve chosen is animals personifying the characteristics that we humans assign to them, such as “clever foxes,” “chatty hens,” “hard-working beavers,” etc.  I cut paper from a vintage watercolor block my dad gave me into sheets that folded into a 4.5×6″ book, and used glue, leather, and calendar pages to finish it.  The result is definitely less than perfect, but I love that it’s not very precious, because it frees from the niggling feeling that I have to make perfect art in it.  I don’t care if it gets mashed, spilled on, or messed up because it’s so shoddy anyway.  I think I’m going to be making tons of my own sketchbooks from now on, mainly because I can choose the specific paper and size used in them.  I’m in love!

 

Cover from my Moleskine, from oiled-paper moth drawings by Morgaine Faye, cut-outs from orange dropcloth used to paint giant puppets at Michael Curry Design, and adhesive letters.

 

Illustration sketchy-sketch inspired by Cassidy Price.

 

Cover made of leather for my small journal bookbinding experiment.

 

Endpapers of vintage maps (courtesy of my roommate Gordon, who’s mad at me because I didn’t ask before I liberated his old calendar pages.  Sorry, Gordonzola!).

 

Sketches from inside the journal.  The phrase “curious as a cat” prompted this spread.