This post on sketchbooks is the third part of a throuple of posts that also include How to be an Artist when you’re taking a Trip and How to design your very own portable Art Kit, because when you go out on the road, not only do you need an art kit to draw with but you need that special sketchbook that you can draw in.
In this post, Free subscribers will get everything you need to know about sketchbooks.
Paid Subscribers will get a Special Art Goodness Bonus: A tour through the world of my favorite sketchbooks and why they work for me which hopefully will help you figure out what will work for you.
You might already have your own favorite sketchbooks, in which case you can read this post for voyeuristic fun. But if you’re like me, and you sometimes agonize over which sketchbook to buy for what purpose, hopefully this will give you a system to make those choices easier for you.
I have three kinds of sketchbooks for three different purposes. Maybe some of these (or all of them) will apply to you.
👉 My Significant Other or Lover Sketchbooks. These are the sketchbooks I take with me when I go about sketching on the road. You can see some of them in the photo at the top of this post. I fill up these sketchbooks one page after another like a visual diary to document the people I’ve seen and the places I’ve been. (Some artists do a similar thing at home with a daily journal sketchbook.) If you’re like me, you care a lot about these sketchbooks ‘cause they contain your memories that you’ll look back on one day … which is a BIG F#CKING DEAL … so you want a super special sketchbook with good paper and a cover that pleases you, that is worthy of your memories and that you will … long sigh … fall in love with.
👉 My Good Friend Sketchbooks.
These are the sketchbooks that instead of taking on the road, I use for specific projects. That could be quick portraits, sketches for personal projects or commissioned illustrations or even random doodles. In essence, these sketchbooks are an extension of my brain, a way to think with my pencil and pens — some pages are just gonna be scribbles waiting to be turned into ideas, while others might end up becoming finished artworks. Below is a sample of some of my good friend sketchbooks, which I’ll go into a little deeper in the special art goodness bonus section below.
👉 Acquaintance Sketchbooks. C’mon, isn’t it so much fun to just have a stash of weird and randomly eccentric sketchbooks of all different sizes and shapes that you’ve collected over the years? These sketchbooks are like acquaintances you rarely see, but when the mood strikes you, you just grab one off the shelf to draw in or to stick in your pocket before you head out the door.
These are the three basic metrics I use to choose sketchbooks depending, of course, on what purpose I’m using the sketchbook for.
Size and Shape: How big do you want your sketchbook pages to be? Some artists like to work small and want something super portable they can fit in their pocket. Other artists want to go crazy and work on something really big. Some artists prefers their pages to be vertical, square or horizontal. In general, most people draw in vertical page sketchbooks that allows you to draw a landscape view if you go across two pages. But some people really like the landscape version so they can make a super wide drawing across two pages.
Paper Quality: In general for looser fun sketching, thinner sketchbook paper is fine. But the more wet medium you lay down on your pages, and the more heavy drawing you do, the thicker and more durable you want your pages to be, because with thin pages everything shows through to the other side and the pages turn into wet paper towels. The measurement that describes the thickness of a page is GSM or pounds. For wet medium, I like books that are at least 100 GSM all the way up to 250GSM or more.
Number of Pages: I love having a sketchbook with a lot of pages because I can just keep working in it for a long time and it builds up a history that’s fun to look back on. But the more pages there are in a sketchbook, the more likely the pages are thin and the quality of the paper sucks. Sketchbooks with lots of pages also tend to be perfect bound which means they don’t open up all the way so it’s hard to draw across the gutter (or even take a nicely lit picture of it). Whereas many sketchbooks with less pages have a “lay-flat binding” that almost makes the gutter disappear so you can draw right across the two pages and make a beautiful spread.
If you’re not sure what kind of sketchbook you want for any particular purpose go to an art store and talk to someone and don’t be afraid to experiment and try things. Of course there are other variables like accordion sketch books, or colored paper or unusual textures, but that’s a personal taste thing so you don’t need me to advise you on that.
Below you will find a…
A tour through the world of my favorite sketchbooks and why they work for me.
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