I’ve always enjoyed making my own sketchbooks. Sketchbooks are essential for me and I use them all the time – for playing with ideas, working poses or compositions, doing thumbnails or just doodling. I also like sketchbooks for keeping finished drawings in – they function as a record of the time for me and I love to go back and flip through them. For the former purpose (random doodling, practicing and working out ideas) I usually make my own out of cheap sketch book paper I have around and make a cover out of a piece of Bristol board. I enjoy making them since they are pretty cheap, I don’t feel bad about wasting pages.
Here’s a pile of some of my handmade ones (I usually make one or two every year to carry around with me.) I even dabbled in using multiple signatures and sewing them together (the third pic below) but usually its just cut the pages and cover sheet down some random size, fold, quick staple and done.
For nicer drawings, I’ve always purchased a nice sketchbook. For a long time, I used Moleskine sketchbooks. Moleskine’s are great for pencil and pen, but I like to do watercolor washes and the regular Moleskine sketchbook paper doesn’t hold up to washes well at all. So a few years ago, I found the moleskine cold press watercolor sketchbooks which turned out to be much better for my ink and wash drawings and even held up to my fountain pen great. For a cold-press water color sketchbook the paper is still relatively smooth so it’s not that bad with pencil and pen. I was happy. But then last year on a whim, I treated myself to the Etchr Labs TPS (“the perfect sketchbook”) 2021 Signature Series. This thing uses hot-press paper (unlike the Moleskine’s cold-press). Hot pressed paper is smoother than cold pressed paper so it can handle the thin little lines more like a bristol board (my favorite paper for pencil and ink) but also holds up to multiple washes of color (unlike bristol) So, I had discovered, that hot-pressed paper hits my sweet spot.
The trouble is there aren’t many sketchbooks that come with hot pressed watercolor paper and the Etchr labs TPS I loved, was a limited edition and is no longer available in the US.
Which brings me to Jose Naranja. Jose is an incredible artist who makes his own hardbound journals and fills them with amazing drawings of his travels. I’ve been a fan for a few years and his blog was one of the reasons I got into making my own sketchbooks many years ago. So why not follow Jose and make my own sketchbook with the paper I want? Jose even has a few blog posts (this one on the basics and this one on how to sew the signatures together) that detail the process. So that is what I did!
The whole process was very enjoyable honestly, and while the end result was far from perfect, I think I can improve on my next one.
- The cover is from a cheap A5 journal I bought from amazon. which I gutted to make room for my hot press paper. The journal came with the rubber band and the ribbons so I kept them.
- I used very heavy 300gsm hot press watercolor paper from an old pad I had which folded in half made for great A5 sketchbook filler. Five, two page signatures. So only about 20 pages but any more would have been too thick for the little notebook I was using for the cover.
- Overall it’s great! Yeah It’s a little wonky. But it’s mine and I can’t wait to use it.
Interesting post. Problem solving into a fun project. You must have looked at a few book binding videos to come up with such a nice end product. Keep on sketching!
GLS