Books For Notes, Books For Sketching

As Pica relates, today we went to Stockton to catch Jack Laws’ bird sketching workshop at the Central Valley Birding Symposium. Despite it being too early in the morning when I got up, I actually came up with a coherent idea for how I would take notes in the workshop. Pica once got from the campus print shop castoff 7“x17” sheets of Endeavour Velvet Book paper, and we have several stacks lying around. It’s not very good paper for anything other than color offset printing, but it works as scratch paper and for practice projects. I took eight sheets of this paper, and folded these in half to make a 7“x8.5” single signature pamphlet. I took notes and made sketches on the signature in the workshop, hoping I had neither too few or too many pages. At home I made a little cover for it out of a sheet of ivy Canson Mi-Tientes paper, and bound it with a three-hole pamphlet stitch.

I was doing my class sketches with my Derwent Graphitints, and was thinking didn’t Derwent recently double the range of the Graphitints from 24 to 48 pencils? Some searching revealed this wasn’t the case (I must have been thinking of the expanded range in the Derwent Drawing Pencils), but I did come across a distressing blog post about lack of lightfastness in the Derwent Graphitints. This post however was in a wonderful new blog by Minnesota book artist Roz Stendahl, the themes of which being sketching, visual journaling, bookbinding, and dogs. She had a great post at the beginning of the month about a major reason I’m interested in bookbinding: how else as a sketcher can one be assured of getting a sketchbook that’s exactly in the format, paper, and design that one wants?