Did a little sketching at Ground this evening. I had a more ambitious picture in mind, but it didn’t get past the pencil stage before I could see I was screwing it up. So I pulled out the larger-sized Moleskine and tried out my Pentel Color Brush. As I feared, the slick Moleskine sketchpad paper just isn’t absorbant enough for the rich tarry black the Color Brush is capable of making. Meh.
( Sketch of Melorne; I’m still working at the dramatic lighting thing )I
lu-u-urve the Moleskine form factor, and the handy extras like the elastic band, the bookmark, the pocket in the back, and the fact that it lies flat. I just don’t like the paper in the sketchbook. I’m giving serious thought to building my own sketchbooks, with hot-press watercolor paper.
Let’s see… It looks like each signature in one of these 4x7" Moleskine sketchbooks has three 8x7" sheets of paper, folded in half for six leaves, or twelve pages. The website says it’s got 100 pages, which ought to come out to about eight signatures. I might go for a slightly larger book, 5x8 or something like that if the paper sizes work out. If I just go for a straight eight signatures, three sheets each, that’s 24 sheets of 8x10 paper.
The standard size for watercolor paper is the Imperial 22x30" sheet. If I cut that into eighths, I get 7.5x11 sheets, which make 5.5x7.5, which is about right.
Dick Blick sells a student-quality 90# (~200 gsm) sheet for, um, 38¢. Wow. A dollar will buy me enough to make a sketchbook. Though I’d have to buy at least ten sheets, and they don’t say what surface it’s got. Hm, “textured”, that doesn’t sound like hot press, which is what I want.
Arches makes a 90# hot press at $2.38 an Imperial sheet. I’d have to order ten ($24), which would make three sketchbooks ($8 each for the paper). Not bad.
Update: Or bristol board! That could maybe work. Do tests first.