Sketchbooks

Last week I wrote about the sketchbooks I was making, this week I’m going to show the pictures! The technique is as always very simple: grab a pile of papers and make holes in them and bind them together with a string. In this batch I pimped them (kind of) with a colored paper as a cover. In the bottom I’ve got cardboard to make them sturdier.

The papers for these sketchbooks were free to take. It will be interesting to see how the format will feel, they are a bit squared...

These papers are from a pile of broken dreams and promises and wants, basically a pile of "shait"! But as sketchbooks or notebooks the will be dandy!

These paper were also free and yet another format, they feel more like drawing pads than sketchbooks.

When I was done with this batch I was amazed by the fact that I had made 11 sketchbooks, I thought that it would be three or four...

I think that it is a brilliant way to make something out of almost nothing. And it is so easy to do, that it’s almost no reason not to! There are a whole range of sketchbooks out there that one can by, some are cheap and some are expensive. But why spend your hard earned cash on something that you can do yourself, out of discarded pieces of paper? Sure it will take some time to make them, but if one looks at the cost per item, there is no excuse. For these eleven sketchbooks I bought four sheets of colored paper. The string I had and also the cardboard, and of course the papers. I’m making an estimate here, but the total cost per item might be around 3-4 SEK, labour not included though ;-)

Alright they may be a bit rough on the eyes but then again they are sketchbooks, not fancy drawing pads with quality papers. In these books I will write down ideas and make sketches, and not do final line drawings. The fact that they are not fancy makes it easier to bring them along or have them in my backpack. The functionality is extremely high!

This week I finally got started drawing, currently I’m analyzing various styles that I can be inspired by when I start with the character design, pictures will follow!

Take care!

Turning something bad into something positive

Lately I've had this pile of papers that I didn't know what to do with.

So what is this? Well, it's a pile of broken dreams, broken hopes, broken expectations, and basically everything that's wrong with the world to day. To speak bluntly it's a pile of shit!

So what to do...? First I thought that I should set it all on fire and jump naked through the flames, but on second thought I'm not so sure my landlord would appreciate that... and I wanted to do something creative with it, like, turning shit into something positive.

And then it dawned on me, why don't I make sketchbooks of it all!

Here is the pile in a more organized fashion, and with more dramatic setting...

Here I've parted them into sketchbook-sizes.

And voila, four new sketchbooks! First I wanted to augment them, with covers and so on, but after giving that some more thought, I came up with this: a pile of shit is still shit even if you cover it in gold. So the only augmentation I made was to add cardboard at the bottom to make them sturdy. So for the time being I'm all set when it comes to sketchbooks/logbooks!

Take care!

P.s I have a fascination for English dialects, many years ago I saw an episode of the british tv-series "Cold feet" where one of the characters pronounces the word shit as shait. I think it's a norhern England dialect, but I'm not sure. So that is how I've seen this pile, as a pile of shait!