Years ago I switched to using hardbound sketchbooks. The paper is high quality, and it’s fun to have a bound collection of finished drawings. If you are a “details” nerd like me, you may have noticed that traditionally bound books are composed of many little sub-stacks of pages that are stitched together. These are called signatures and are further assembled into a larger stack that gets trimmed and attached to the endpapers and cover. (Patience. This will be relevant in a minute.)
For me, using a hardbound sketchbook poses a challenge that was initially unexpected. If you tear a page out, the opposite side of the bound signature will fall out, since it is no longer held by the stitches and the opposing page. Because of this, I never remove pages from my hardbound sketchbooks, so I feel pressured to produce a high-quality sketch on every page. The sketchbook in the video is complete. One page is blank, since it had been ruined by a blot of ink, but no pages were edited or removed. The majority of the drawings were completed while waiting for my kids to finish their karate classes. That explains why there are pages toward the back that include a few doodles, cartoons or quick sketches I created to entertain children who were also in the dojo waiting room.
All the sketches were done on my lap using a lead holder with mostly 4-6h pencils, a lead pointer and loads of erasing. Everything other than the doodles was sketched from my own photos.
In full disclosure, this wasn’t the only sketchbook I used during this time. I did a ton of working sketches and thumbnails for other projects on printer paper. The sketchbook was reserved for more finished drawings and studies for potential paintings. In the cases where the sketch was eventually turned into a painting, I included a small version of the painting in the corner of the video.
If you see something in the video that you’d like to purchase as an original or print, please contact me. Also, some of my work is available for licensing.
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