What inspired me to go through all the trouble to make my own watercolour sketchbooks? It's silly looking back at it. I was packing my sketching kit for my upcoming trip and thought that lugging a whole Moleskine watercolour journal would be a bit too much, so I figured since I had a sheet of Strathmore Imperial paper lying around, I might as well use that and make my own sketchbook. I didn't need a whole Moleskine's worth of pages after all, I reasoned. But when I discovered that I would only be able to get 13 A5-sized leafs (26 pages) out of one sheet, I realised I probably needed to make 2 books and bring only one out at a time.
And so I did.
I didn't take photos of the process, unfortunately, but here are some photos I did snap after making the first one.
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| Double rubber bands. I forgot to include them for the 2nd book. |
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| This is how thin the books are. This one uses 300 gsm Saunders Waterford. |
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| The cover is made of 1 folded card and another couple of cards pasted over the outside. |
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| The pages are not sewn but bound by thread so they can be removed and bound after the trip. |
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| Back page is about 1/2 page. Can be used for testing watercolours. |
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| This is the second sketchbook in progress. This one uses the Strathmore Imperial. |
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| The 2nd cards haven't been glued yet. I totally forgot to put in the rubber bands for this one. |
In the end, the 2 sketchbooks weigh more than 1 Moleskine. However, since I'm bringing only one around at a time, my purpose is still fulfilled.
