Sketchbook Landscapes

Inspired by Minnie Small on Youtube I've been doing some small landscape paintings based on images from Google maps street view.
Have you ever just looked around on Google maps? Dropped the little man on a random spot in a random country and had a walk around. It's fascinating!

The paintings are done with gouache and are quite quick to do. I can get one or two done in an evening which is great for keeping my hand in the painting game without committing too much time.
The sketchbook I'm using is a little A5 one from Seawhite. The paper isn't the best for wet materials, but it was only about 60p so I don't mind.

I had a good look around this lake in China. I'd love to know what that colourful teepee type structure is as I saw a few of them around the lake. I also loved that image of the boy posing for a photo so I had to draw that. I switched things up by using colour pens rather than paint.
I like the mix of images and materials, all relating to one area, so I'm keen to do more pages like this.

Handmade Sketchbooks

Every time I see a post on book binding or handmade notebooks I always feel really inspired. I finally put the project on my to do list and this is what I came up with.

I really wanted my books to have a mix of papers to make things more interesting, and each one unique. I started by going through my over flowing drawers of paper and picking out pieces to use as the pages. I've got cartridge paper, lined paper, coloured paper, squared paper, sugar paper, patterned paper, tracing paper and more.

I cut all the paper into A5 sized pieces and then folded them in half to A6 size. My tip for doing this is to fold them against a stack of post-its so the edges are alligned. It doesn't have to be post-its though, anything with a raised, flat edge will do, eg, a book, a box.

I then cut some card for the covers. I made them a millimetre or two bigger than the pages. I used Amazon cardboard envelopes which I have a fair few of as I love the quality of the card.

I arranged all my pages into books, making sure to have a good mix of all the different types of paper.

In my first attempt I used staples to attach the pages together but I didn't love how it turned out, so I tried sewing the pages together.

I started by marking four dots, about 3cm apart, along the fold of the centre page. Then I took a drawing pin and pierced four holes through the whole stack of papers. You can't see from the photo, but I had a lump of blue-tack on the other side of the paper so the pin had someting to go in to instead of my table top. I put a scrap piece of paper over the blue-tack so that it didn't stick to my book pages.

I then used one of the pages as a guide to pierce holes in the cardboard cover.

Then I used cream coloured sewing thread, doubled up, to sew the pages and the cover together. I arranged it so the knot would be between the last page and the cover as this would be covered up later.

Next I covered the card cover with something a bit more attractive. This was a chance for me to use some of the really colourful fabric I have in my stash.

I cut the fabric about an inch bigger than the card cover and cut the corners off. I used PVA glue to stick the fabric to the cover, one side at a time.

I then glued the first and last pages to the inside of the cover to cover up the edges of the fabric. This is also how the knot gets covered up.

The last thing to do was trim the pages so they all appear the same size when the book is closed. 

And before I knew it, I'd made all of these!

I really enjoyed making these books. I love the mix of pages. Much more interesting than page after page of blank white.

I hope I've explained my process well enough. Let me know if you have any questions!

Sketchbooks #2: Barcelona

I've got another recently rediscovered sketchbook to share with you. This one is from a school art trip to Barcelona in 2007 when I was in Year 12. There's not too much worth showing as it turns out I was too busy taking selfies in galleries to do any decent work.

This is a charcoal drawing of a statue on a Spanish newspaper background.

This is a colour pencil drawing on a water colour background. I quite like this one but I can not remember what the place was called. 

I remember where this half finished watercolour painting was done; Parc Guell, the Gaudi place.

And lastly some wax crayon rubbings done at...I'm guessing Gaudi's cathedral, but I'm not sure. Past-me should have taken more notes! Let that be a lesson to you. Annotate your sketchbooks!

Sketchbooks #1 New York

When I was sorting through my room recently I stopped to look through my old sketchbooks and I thought they were worth sharing. The first one I'm going to show you is from my trip to New York with college when I was doing my art foundation course in 2009. Everything in the sketchbook was done after the trip because our luggage, which had my sketchbook in, got lost (nightmare!) and wasn't returned until a few days after we got back

I did a whole page on money cos everything is a memory! When I was in the big Virgin Megastore in Time Square I hugged the Country section. Mel B from the Spice Girls was also doing a signing there. Mel actual B!

There was snow in Central Park while we were there which made chalk and charcoal a good choice. I drew on a newspaper that I picked up there working from a photo I'd taken.

Squirrel!

I used chalk pastels on black paper to capture this night scene, which could have been a view from the Empire State building, I can't quite remember.

And I made my own version of a mosaic subway sign using more of the newspaper.

See more from a different New York trip (where my luggage actually came with me) here.

My space

When looking for blank pages in the back of sketchbooks I came across this project I thought I'd share.

It was the summer project I was assigned before going to uni in 2009, entitled 'myspace'.

I decided to create a bunch of arty pages around my home town, and here's a few of them

I started with a photo of a young me outside my garage, and then drew the rest of the house around it.

The bus stop where I used to catch the bus to school was right next to a field that had ponies in it.

Nice, right? Not when it's 8 in the morning a pony is weeing right next to you.

This is a view of our watermill painted in watercolours.

A pencil drawing of one of the churches.

A page about the playgroup I went to.

That's a chalk pastel drawing on the right, drawn on my town's section of the local paper. Clever.

Mostly I just liked including photos of me when I was younger.

Too many of my school uniforms involved wearing a tie though...

I think this is probably the closest I've got to 'art journalling' and it's a nice little record to have of my home town and the parts that mean something to me.