I made sketchbooks

Watercolour sketchbooks are a pain - the paper is never as good as the 300gsm 100% cotton that I buy in sheets, unless the sketchbook is $100, and then I freak out about using it (or I think I would, I have never actually spent $100 on a sketchbook, but I suspect I would find it hard to use). So I had a go at making my own using any tutorial that said it was 'easy'. I did go down a lovely rabbithole of bookbinding - wow that looks like fun - but I'm not at the point of special tools and sewing things up. Yet. 

So this is a concertina sketchbook - the cover boards aren't attached to each other so it unfolds into a long strip like a concertina, but you draw on it page by page (if you want to). It's conceptually straightforward - take a bit of the lovely paper, make it into three strips, glue them together, fold them and add board covers and a ribbon. Lots of PVA, a bit of pretty scrapbooking paper and a glue stick. 

I am generally happy with it but despite best efforts my lack of neat-fingeredness shows through - the covers are too big and none of it lines up exactly as it should. But I've started painting in it (my summer project is pen and wash of the old style beach houses in my little beach town) and it's really nice. Because it's the good paper you can do both sides and despite some really wet washes it hasn't warped or bled at all.

This is the other style I did which isn't as pretty but has been quite useful - simply rings with holes in the paper and a covered back board. It keeps everything together and you can take it en plein air should I ever choose to do something so peculiar. This is slightly different lovely paper which is quite ivory in tone. I tore the pages rather than cut them so it's nice and raggedy at the sides.

And this is a poor copy of a Taiwanese artist (goes by J.Y. Drawing) who does these wonderfully detailed streetscapes using a fountain pen and quite wobbly lines. It's a fabulous combination of exact reproduction and impression. The bits I left out of this picture are cars and people which I'm still struggling with.