Handmade Sketchbook - Altered Bookmaking

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Elizabeth and welcome to my class Altered bookmaking sketchbooks. I love bookmaking. I love finding all sorts of different ways to create new sketchbooks. And in this class, we are going to be altering a found book and turning a hardcover book into a personalized sketchbook. This has become one of my favorite ways to create my own personalized sketchbooks. And I'm going to show you two ways to add your pages so that you can either have it be a bound and done. Or one where you can put sections of your pages in and out and have it be more of like a fluid travel sketchbook. I'm a professionally trained artist and art educator. I'm also a published author and illustrator with a children's book as well as an original illustration coloring book, and I've been teaching on skill share since 2020. On Skill Share, I create classes where I share my creative passions, my artistic techniques, my different creative things that are getting me excited on my artists journey, and really encouraging students to follow along as to hopefully inspire them on their creative journey. I love approaching different art making processes and use a wide range of art media in my classes. And in this class, I wanted to give you some control over personalizing your own sketchbook and sharing my passion for altered bookmaking, especially in relation to sketchbooks with my students. This class is intended for creatives of all skill levels as an entry point into sketchbookmking. It is a fairly easy process to do, and it's a nice alternative to bookmaking that maybe you haven't explored in the past, and it's really fun to go thrifting and scavenging for old books that you can give new life as your sketchbook. I hope you'll consider joining me in this altered bookmaking sketchbook class. 2. Class Project: For our class project, we are going to be sourcing an old hardcover book. You can find this at your local thrift stores or maybe even around your own house. It could be any hardcover book and you get to choose what size you want to work with. The thicker the binding, the more sketchbook pages you'll be able to fit inside. So kind of think about what sketchbook you're interested in making and how thick you want your sketchbook to be. Then we are going to be learning how to gut that book in preparation for giving it new life as a sketchbook, how to reinforce the spine, the sewing techniques needed to create signatures. So those are the sections of sewn together pages within a book and then two ways to attach those to the hard book cover that you've prepared. There's a list of materials that you're going to need for class over on the class description. But let's head it over to the next lesson to take a look at what you're going to want to have on hand. See you soon. 3. Materials: The materials for our class are fairly straightforward as far as book binding materials go, but we are going to need to either find at home a hardcover book that we're going to then give new life as a sketchbook or go out to a thrift store to source one. Think about what size sketchbook you are interested in making and the thickness of your binding is going to determine the number of paper signatures that you create for the inside. How thick do you want your sketchbook to be? You might want to pick up a couple of different hardcover books if you're going out to a thrift store because this can be quite an addictive process and who doesn't love having more sketchbooks on hand. Let's take a look at what supplies we're going to want to have. So to start off, you're going to want to have an old book of some sort. Then it's going to have its pages still inside. This one I've already gutted. So the easiest way to gut the inside of your book is with an exacto knife because you're going to be cutting out the inside of the pages. And then to reinforce the binding, you're going to want to have some sort of piece of fabric. This can be felt. This can be just kind of a thin cotton strip. It doesn't matter, but it needs to be a wide enough strip that it's going to go over the binding of the book, the inner binding, and then overlap the covers a little bit. So something like that works really, really great, to glue that down, I like to use bookmaking glue. This is a PVA glue, but you could use any kind of white liquid glue. A little bit goes a long way. So it would be a great investment in future bookmaking projects, and you could also use it for other adhesion techniques and paper projects, too. For the glue that comes in here, I like to put it in a small cup, and then I'm going to apply it with an old paintbrush. This is just an old acrylic paint brush. For the signatures of our book, I'm going to do you can do a mix of whatever kind of papers that you want to. This is a pretty big book. If I'm doing this one, then I need paper that is the full width of this when I open this up because then that gets folded in half and then we stitch those together to make the signatures. But some examples of papers that you could consider if you're going to be drawing primarily into it, then any sketching paper works great. It doesn't really matter how thin or thick it is as long as you can easily fold several pages together to make each individual signature. If you want to do more watercolor or mixed media work inside your sketchbook, you're going to want to go for a mixed media paper or watercolor paper. When it comes to mixed media and watercolor papers, I really like Hanson's brand. This one is the exact same book, but this one's been filled. So this one has two signatures, but I've done a lot of collaging and mixed media work into it, so my pages are pretty thick. Just this is four pages. This is one full sheet, folded in half and then stitched in. So four sheets that are about nine by 12 give or take would make one signature. So we are going to want at least eight sheets of whatever this width is doubled. We're going to want to have some scissors on hand and then to do the actual sewing for the signatures, I like using embroidery floss. Each strand of this has six threads to it, so you can easily thin it to get quite a lot out of it. Embroidery floss is pretty inexpensive. What I like about embroidery floss over sewing thread is that it's a little bit sturdier and a little bit thicker. Sometimes the sewing thread can cut through the paper a little bit, and then you're going to want to have some needles. These are craft needles. I like these or embroidery needles because they have a bigger eye on the needle because I need to be able to get at least half of this thread through that needle easily. Then the last thing you're going to want to have on hand is either an owl. This is for making holes in paper so that you can stitch through that to sew up the signatures, or you can just use a regular old push pen. The ones like this are nice because it gives you something to hold onto when you push through it. When you do do that pushing through, you're going to want to have a scrap of cardboard or a cutting mat underneath it. The cardboard actually works better because the pin can go into the cardboard without going through to the bottom surface and ensure that it goes all the way through to the full width of the point, the full width of the needle so that you get a really nice hole, so it's easier to sew it into. That is all that we're going to need to create our altered handmade sketchbooks. Now that you've gathered up your art supplies and potentially made a field trip to your local thrift store to find the perfect hardcover book for this project, let's dive into our first lesson as we prepare our book for its new life as a sketchbook. 4. Prepping Hardcover Book: So the first step to get our hardcover book ready is to gut the inside. So this is a hardcover book that I've already got it in prepped. But the first step is to go in with an exacta knife and cut along the edges where the inside registers, the pages inside the book are glued to the binding. So you're going to go ahead and slice as many times as you need to to, like, loosen the inside pages so that you can take them off of the binding. Then we need to reinforce the binding a little bit. So a great way to do that is with a piece of fabric. I like to use PVA glue, but you can also use any liquid white glue that you have. And I brush that onto a piece of fabric or felt, anything that you have, it just seems to be wider than your binding so that it goes over part of the front cover, the binding in the middle, and then part of the back cover, and it needs to be the height of your book. Then you're going to brush glue all over that piece of fabric so that it's going to adhere really, really well because this is an important part of stabilizing our altered book. Then you're going to go ahead and take the fully glue covered piece of fabric and you're going to lay that over so that it covers the inner binding section of your book and then overlaps, like I said, the front and the back cover, and then smooth it down really good and make sure that you press into the creases so that it really molds to the shape of the inner binding of your book and then set it aside to dry. Now that we have prepped our hardcover binding by reinforcing it with fabric, we are now going to prepare to get our signatures ready to go inside our book. So I've got my paper and I've measured in roughly where I want things to go as far as the vertical line. And then I figured out roughly where the top and the bottom holes are going to go and then the middle one. And then I used my L to puncture through those. And what that's going to do is that's going to give me a template that I can use to do the holes on the binding. As you work on this, you'll figure out what works best for you. I need that vertical line to help me figure out where my template is going to go. I found that just drawing it right on the fabric and marking the top and the bottom with my ruler for each of the two vertical points for where my signatures are going to get put into my hardcover book worked great. Not measuring it. I'm just eyeballing it, roughly one third and two thirds in so that they're fairly evenly spaced out. Then I can go ahead and take my template where I have my holes and I can use my pencil marks on my book binding and line that up with the holes and just make sure that I hold my template paper really still so that I can then start puncturing the holes. You can work in any order you want to, but I like to work at the top and then readjust as I need to making sure things are still lined up as I go down. But as long as you have the initial holes going into the binding of your book, then you can take the template paper off there and you can work back into that hardcover a little bit more. So I'm scooching over my template while I have things lined up with my next mark because I'm doing six holes altogether, three holes for each signature, and I'm going ahead and I'm doing the initial puncture for where the holes are going to go through my template. Now I've got my six holes, and then I can really go in with the owl or the push pin and I can push in there to get it to go through the binding and to get it to be big enough so that I can sew into it. I do a swirling motion so it's widening the hole a little bit so that I can get my needle in. They don't have to be terribly wide because we're sewing this one. So a needle is not very thick. Even the bigger ones that we're using for this that have the larger eyes a little bit. So just kind of go in there with your owl and kind of wiggle, wiggle and swivel around to get all six of your holes nice and solid. The biggest point is just to get them even all the way through because the binding is pretty thick. So you might have to kind of go back and forth and play around with it a little bit. And if as you get into sewing it, you find that you're having a hard time getting through the binding. You can always get out your owl again and you can, you know, make your holes a little bit bigger. In the next lesson, we'll begin preparing our papers. 5. Preparing Sketchbook Signatures: So now we have to figure out how big we need our papers to be, get them cut down and prepared to sew together to create the signatures inside our sketchbook. So the first step is to measure the height of your book. So how tall is it from the very top of the book to the very bottom of the book? And then you need to figure out how wide it is. And when you do the width, there's two ways you can do it. You can open up the book and you can measure all the way from the edge of one cover to the edge of the other cover. But sometimes it's helpful to do it with the book closed, but go from the very edge of the binding side all the way to the section of the page that opens. And then when you double that, that's going to give you your width. So the height of your book times double the width of your book will be what we need for our inside pages. So I'm using Canton mixed media paper. I really enjoy this type of paper because it gives me a lot of flexibility, and I really like to work mixed media. And this way, whatever I want to do inside my book, I can do. So now I'm just marking my paper. I'm using giant 18 by 24 sheets of paper so that I can cut that down. I always work with giant pads like this so that I have a lot of flexibility for what I can cut my paper down to. So I'm just getting all of the papers ready for the inside. This is my first section of paper, to set that aside, out of these sheets, I can get two big stacks of full sketchbook spreadsheets that I can use. So a tip that I find really helpful is to mark your paper in two spots when you're measuring to cut paper. I find that often the ruler will wiggle on me, and we're cutting so much paper for our sketchbooks, and you really want that paper to be measured accurately so that your book comes together really nicely in the end. So if you do a measurement toward the top of the paper and a measurement toward the bottom, and then you can line those up, and then you can use your exacto knife to cut along the edge. And the exacto knives work much more effectively if you use less pressure and you just do more cuts. You'll get a cleaner cut to your paper, and then you can still work in a large stack so that you're really maximizing your cuts to paper output. So now I'm stacking up the two sections that I've cut, and I still need to do a tiny bit of trimming to make them line up with how wide my sketchbook is. So my sketchbook was 8 " when it was closed. I'm going to cut it a little bit bigger because when we fold our signatures and when we stack the sheets to put together a segment of signatures or a segment for a signature, we're going to lose a little bit of the paper, and I'd rather have my pages potentially stick out a little bit than have to worry about them being a little too short. Now, often when you look at a hardcover book, you'll note that the pages are a little smaller than the book itself. You could adjust for this so you could tweak it, but I'd rather err on the side of the exact same size as my cover and not really worry too much about that. The reason why the pages are a little smaller on a hard book is so the pages are protected. So the edge of those pages are kind of protected because they're inside a little bit. But for an altered sketchbook, I think it doesn't really matter. But if you want to kind of get technical about it, you could always cut in a little bit from your original measurement. So I'm trimming off the edges, so I'm going to have these extra strips that I can then save for collage or any future anything. And I'm going to use one of those strips later for another step in our process. So save at least one of those strips or make sure you have one for later on in the process. This is a bone folder. You don't have to have one, but it's a really handy dandy bookmaking tool. It's to really get a crisp fold. So I'm going to fold my first sheet over, and I like to do them separate. You get a much cleaner fold if you do them one individual sheet at a time. So then I start the process, and then I use the bone folder and run that over the folded edge to get a really sharp crease. If you don't have a bone folder, you could always use the edge of a marker or if you have a shorter ruler, anything that is kind of a hard surface that you can kind of manage and hold, like I'm holding the bone folder will work great. But you could also just crease it with your fingers, too and just give it a really nice grease. So now I've creased every single sheet of my sketchbook paper, and I'm going to get those organized into two signatures because that's what I've decided I can fit inside the hardcover book that I'm using. So I'm going to divide this stack in half, and then I'm going to put the pages inside each other so that I have what will become a sewn signature. So I'm going to start with the top one, and I'm going to go ahead and open it up and take the next sheet down and just kind of, like, keep stacking them up. So you can, I'm stacking, you know, the next sheet on top of the other one. You can work the other way too, where you can kind of keep filling the outermost page with your pages. But ultimately, you want to get everything nice and stacked and assembled before you move on to the next step. Now I'm going to do the exact same thing for the second signature that I'm creating for my altered sketchbook. Consider how many signatures you can fit inside your sketchbook and what media you might want to work on in your sketchbook. Because if you collage into the pages and you paint into the pages, they're going to get a little thicker. So it's always nice to have a little extra binding space between signatures. So even if it feels like maybe you could fit more pages or more signatures, always err on the side of having a little extra room because anything that you do to it, those pages get much thicker, and you're going to want to have a little extra space. So now I need to prepare to prep my paper, to sew my paper, to actually crit my signatures. So I'm getting my owl out. I'm going to get out my crafting needles, and then I've got my embroidery floss on hand. So like I said, you can use the owl or you can use a push pin like this, which works great because it's got a handle. It's going to just be something that punctures through the pages that can create a big enough hole to sew through. And then I'm going to end up using two different colors of embroidery floss. I'm going to use one to sew the signatures, and then I'm going to use another one to show how to sew the signatures to the book. So let's head on over to the next lesson to sew our signatures. 6. Sewing Sketchbook Signatures: The Now I'm going to take my two signatures, and I'm going to get those ready to be sewn. So I'm going to open them up to the center and then so that I've got a nice even stack and I make sure that my fold is lined up nice and neat. And then I'm going to use the same template that I used for the binding cover to do the inside holes. Finally, it helps to fold it at this stage so that it's really easy to kind of figure out where those holes line up. And then when you have that fold, it's going to lay inside the gutter that your signature creates when it's opened up to its centermost point. Once it's lined up, I can go ahead and puncture through my template hole and then all the way through that point in the folded sketchbook gutter, and then I can do the same thing with the center and the bottom. As long as I have those initial sections marked with the owl, then I can then take the template off and really make sure that I have punctured all the way through the full stack of sketchbook pages so that there's a nice even hole created through all three parts. That's really important for making sure that it's very easy to sew it later on. Don't want a giant hole, but we want to be able to pass our needle through very easily. So I've got one signature done, just giving a little fold. I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing to my second signature. So I'm going to go ahead and open it up again, make sure everything's lined up, and then puncture through all three parts. Now I'm ready to get my embroidery floss ready to sew. So to measure this out, I pull it one length of the sketchbook height, two lengths of sketchbook het and three lengths of the sketchbook height, and then I trim it off. You can measure it if you want to, but it's just as easy to pull it and eyeball it and I err on the side of having a little bit of extra thread. Then in brdry floss, when it's at its full state, when you buy it at the store, there's actually six strands there. You can take it apart into different sections depending on how much floss you want to use. I like just taking the six strands and dividing that in half and that gives me three strands, which provides a nice, sturdy amount to do stitch for a signature. Because I'm doing two signatures in the book, six strands makes perfect sense because I'm measuring once, and then I've got both of my sections of embroidery floss ready. Pulling it apart can be a little tricky. You have to be a little patient because as you pull it apart, those strands have been wrapped around. They're twisted up a little bit. So you have to kind of untwist them as you go. So patience works really is an important key here to really kind of get those untangled. If you do get a little bit of it not like I did, you kind of pull the different sections this way and that and it'll untwist itself. And now I can go ahead and get out my raft needle and get that threaded. The great thing about this sewing technique is that the only knotting that you're doing is at the very end when you are done sewing your signature together. So we just need our needle, and then we're going to thread it through the eye of the needle, leaving a little short tail and then all of the rest of the length that is going to be then what we sew through the different sections of our signatures. And now I'm ready to begin. I like to go in through the center hole first. You can go in through the outside or the inside, but wherever you leave the tail end of your stitch, that's where your knot is going to be. So because the outer fold of my signature section is going to be attached to my book cover. That's going to get hidden in the long run, so it just makes so much sense to do it there. Here's where you might find that you need to do a little bit of widening of the holes that you initially punctured through your signatures, but it works great. So I'm going into the hole from the outside, leaving a little bit of a tail. We just need a couple inches, four or five to be on the safe side, and then we're going to go to one end of our signature and go back through that hole and pull it nice and tight without pulling our tail through. Then from the outer side, we're going to go all the way to the opposite side and we're going to go in through that outer hole again, pull the string through until it's tightened all the way and then go back out again through the center hole. And then at this point, what I like to do is make sure that my two strand ends on either side of my connecting thread. Pull that nice and tight. Be careful because thread can rip the paper. But we do want it nice and tight and secure. So I get it nice and tight, and then I'm going to double or triple knot it just to really make sure that my sewing isn't going to come undone in the long run. And once you have two or 3 knots in there, you can go ahead and trim off the exe thread. We did overestimate the thread quite a bit, but I'd rather err on the side of too much thread than not enough. If you wanted to use a little less than three lengths of your sketchbook height, you absolutely could. Then there we go. We have one sewn signature nice and secured ready for our sketchbook. We're going to do the exact same thing with our next signature, and you're just going to continue this process until all the signatures that you've decided to create are sewn. Now both of mine are sewn and I am ready for the next step of my project, which is option one for attaching my signatures to the inside cover of my sketchbook. Let's head on over to the next lesson to learn the first option that you can choose for attaching your signature pages to your sketchbook cover. See you there. 7. Option 1: Attaching Signatures to Cover: Now that we've sewn together the signatures of our book, we're going to sew those signatures to the spine of our book cover. So we're going to do the same stitching method that we did to attach our signatures together so that we're actually creating an attached segment of pages. So we're going to get our embroidery loss, and we're going to pull it three lengths of our book. So whatever the height of your book is, it's going to be three times that. You can just eyeball it and pour it a little bit beyond that and then snip that off. And then just like before, we're going to split our six threaded embroidery floss into two sections of three. It just takes a little bit of patience before it likes to tangle up because it's all twisted together. So you just slowly separate out the strands so that you have two sections of three. And then I'm going to go ahead and thread your needle. And again, there's no knots until the very end. So we just need enough of the thread through the needle eye so that we can start sewing. So we're going to sew one signature at a time. So we're going to go through the center of our signature, and then we're going to find the center hole that we created in the binding of our sketchbook. And then we're going to go down to the bottom hole of the cover and kind of get the needle through there. This is the easiest way to do it. I just kind of keep everything really loose, and then find the hole at the bottom of your signature. And then you're going to pull that through all the way until you're leaving 5 " or so of tail where your thread initially went through the center hole of the signature and then go up to the top hole of your signature and get it through that section. Then you're going to go through the top hole of the sketchbook binding, the hardcover binding. Then you go back down through the center hole of the binding cover so that you have your two thread ends on the center of your signature on the inside of the sketchbook when the signature is open. Then you can double or triple, not that once you've pulled everything tight so that your signature section is right up snug against the inner binding of your hardcover. And then after you have two to three nuts, you're going to want to trim off the excess thread. And then you now have your signature sewn nice and snugly into the binding of your book, and if you are doing two signatures, you are halfway done with finishing this stage of your book. So now I'm going to do the exact same thing with my other signature. Now, you will notice that I sew the back most signature in first. I like working back to front and when I'm creating a new sketchbook, I just feel it's a little bit easier. If I was doing it front to back, I would just end up flipping it and sewing it backwards it's kind of going to navigate that other signature a little bit when you're putting in additional ones. So this is just kind of a nice way to do it so that the uppermost part of your sketchbook is the one that you're working with every time you're working through. So back to front works really great for sewing in your signatures. And then depending on how thick your book is, how thick your cover is, you could put in as many more signatures as you want to. But for mine, I wanted to have some excess space, like I said, for doing collaging and painting and mixed media work. My pages will grow as I work back into this book. Having a little extra wiggle room in my binding has become really helpful for me to consider each time that I make any handmade sketchbook, but especially when I'm working back into a repurposed hardcover book to make it into a sketchbook. And everything from here on out is exactly the same as what we did when I was sewing in the first signature of my sketchbook. So I'm going to go ahead and speed up the video a little bit since you don't need to watch this again. But you could always slow down the playback if you wanted to see it a second time. But it's the exact same process that I went through to attach the first signature to the back half of my sketchbook. So this was permanently sewing the signatures in heading over to the next lesson to see a alternative way that you can attach your signatures to the cover where they can be moved in and out of the sketchbook as you wish. 8. Option 2: Attaching Signatures to Cover: Here's another way that we can attach our signatures to the cover of our book, but this allows us to put our signatures in and out of the book. So the first step, just like before, we need to puncture holes into the binding of our book. So I've got my same guide that I used before, and I'm going to kind of mark the top and the bottom so that I can easily line up the holes of my template so that I know that I'm making them straight because once you start putting holes in the binding, they are stuck there for good. So I'm going to put some cardboard underneath so that I can puncture through the cover easily and not damage the surface beneath my art table. And then I'm lining up my guide with one of the pencil marks that I put at the top and the bottom, and I'm using my L to puncture through the binding of the book. And it works really nice to kind of put it, stick it through and then kind of wiggle it around a little bit to get it started. And then you can move your template out of the way and you can puncture through and really kind of wiggle it around. The circular motion allows me to widen the hole because for this one, we're going to be putting through some elastic cord. So I really want to make sure that it's big enough to feed that through because I'm not going to be using a needle for this. So now that I've got that punctured, I'm going to measure out my cord. So this is just fun elastic boarding that I found online on Amazon. I'm sure you can get this in sewing sections or craft sections of your store, but I'll include a link to it in the project description. So you can see what I was using. It comes in a huge pack with a whole lot of it for a really good price. You'll get a lot of arding which you can use hopefully for a lot of different things. You go ahead and you put it through one of the holes and pull some out, and then you're going to pull it down to the bottom. What we want to have is we want to have the doubled up distance between your two holes. But we also want to make sure that it's nice and tight so that it's going to hold the signature inside the book and not wiggle wobble it. So I like to pull it a little bit taunt and then cut off the excess and then make sure that it's got kind of a nice spring back to it. So the elastic is going to be nice and sturdy. If it pops out the holes, it doesn't matter. You can have it tie on the inside or on the outside. I like to have it tie on the outside so that the inside of my signatures lay as flat as possible. So I'm going to pull it nice and tight, and I'm going to go ahead and double or triple knot it just to make sure that it's not going to come undone. And then once that is set and I have it nice and securely knotted, I'm going to go ahead and cut off the extra of my elastic, just so that it's a nice clean finish on the outside. I did accidentally puncture the top, the middle, and the bottom because I was using the same template that I had made for sewing the signatures to the inside cover of the book. So that's why you'll see when I flip the book and we see the exterior of the cover, that's why I got those extra holes. But we don't need them for this step because we're just creating an elastic band that's going to hold our signatures in. So trimming off the extra for the elastic, and then I'm going to go ahead and do this one more time through the other two holes of my book. Now let's take a look at how our signatures go inside this type of book. So this is a smaller one that I've done. Same thing. It's got two signature sections, and you can see how you can easily open it up to the middle, pull the signature section out, and that one is sewn, so the signature is forever put together, but it can go in and out of any sketchbook that you want to. So the sections just slide in and out, and then you close them and they stay inside the sketchbook. It's pretty amazing because you can continually make new signatures. So you're constantly refreshing your sketchbook, and at any point in time, you could just leave your filled signatures in there and have it be a finished book. So you do the exact same thing for as many sections as you can fit inside your hardcover book. This is another example where I use the same size cookbook for my cover, and then the elastic, I can just take the section out, put it to the side, put a new one in, and I can also move my signatures between different sections. And it holds them and they're pretty great. It's really wonderful. It's also nice if you want to do some different mixed media approaches and let your section dry. In our next lesson, we'll take a look at one way you can decorate the cover of your hardcover sketchbook. See you there. 9. Decorating Book Cover: There's a variety of ways that you can decorate the front and back cover your hardcover altered sketchbook. For this one, I just wanted to do something really simple, so I grab some fun colors of tissue paper, a water down some of my liquid glue in a cup, and now I'm just painting the glue across the surface to give it a little adhesion. And then I'm going over it with torn strips of tissue paper. The tissue paper is going to become transparent as it gets wet. So there's that fun play of seeing whatever cover you originally started with showing through, but you can also layer it up so that you don't see any of the imagery underneath. I kind of like that play, and I love the fact that I'm using an old cookbook for this. So it's kind of fun to, you know, see the corn through in some of the spots. And the great thing about this is I don't have to be terribly precious. So you'll see, you know, some of the strips of tissue paper are getting a little warped. Here, I forgot to put down some glue beforehand. I didn't have to do this because the glue is going to absorb through my tissue paper, but it just kind of helps keep it in place a little bit, and then you can go back into it on top with a little bit more of the liquid kind of watered down liquid glue to create some more adhesion. And then it's just a matter of building up more and more layers and kind of getting it as thick as you want to. So I kind of started with my base brighter pink, put in a little bit of the lighter pink, and I'm kind of going back and forth just to kind of build up some richness of color. So like I said, here I'm using tissue paper, and it's very transparent, especially as I wet it with the water down glue. But you could do this exact same process with any collage materials that you have. And then the thicker the paper, the harder it's going to be to kind of conform to the bend in the spine when you actually close the buck back up again. But as long as you focus on the main front and back covers with those thicker collage materials, collaging it will work just fine. And you don't have to do the water down glue. Like you could just do glue glue, but I do often find that I need a little bit of sealant over the top. So the liquid glue acts as an h sieve to get things to stick, but then it also acts as kind of a sealant to make sure that everything sticks just fine. So as far as my design goes, I'm really just, you know, intuitively grabbing from the colors that I pre selected for my cover. I wanted to have some of that dark blue in there, just some really fun pops, and I'm kind of playing around with thick and thin strips and letting it get, you know, distorted and the tearing of the process. So this is just a really fun, quick way to do it. You could put as much care and plan into your cover design as you want to, but it's a really fun way to give a little personal flair to the outside of the sketchbook because the inside when you begin is blank. So it's a blank canvas for you to play with, explore it, and try all sorts of new fun creative things. But starting with the cover just kind of helps kind of introduce you to your sketchbook and get you excited about the possibilities of what you can create on the inside. Now we've explored altered bookmaking and handmade sketchbook bookbinding approaches, and you have created your own altered book sketchbook. Lesson over to the next lesson to wrap up the glass. See you soon. 10. Final Thoughts: Okay. Thank you so much for joining me in my class, alter bookmaking sketchbooks. I hope you are excited about the freedom of creating your own sketchbook and giving new life to a hardcover book that may not have had such an exciting life beyond this. I'm super excited to see what you created, hear about your journey, and really find out the different ways that you are planning on using your sketchbooks in your creative journey. Be sure to pop on over to the Projects and Resources sections of class. Click the Create Project button and share some photos of the sketchbook that you created. As well as how it went, how was your experience doing altered bookmaking as an approach to creating your own unique sketchbook? Maybe what are some adventures you plan on taking your sketchbook on? You can also update your project anytime. If you do take your sketchbook out and about on different adventures or even just around the house or in your creative space, take some photos and share that with us. I love seeing sketchbooks out in the wild and finding all of the fun places that they go and things that they capture. You can also share these over on the discussion section of class too. I would love to hear how your process went taking this class and working on this project. Please consider taking the time to leave a review. It's a great opportunity to reflect on what you've learned, how you might apply it in the future, and just share insights on a student to student basis with other students that might be considering checking out the class. I really appreciate your feedback as I consider class revisions and future class maaking that I have going on. I also love to connect outside of Skill Share. If you're over on Instagram, sharing what you're up to or where you're taking your sketchbook, be sure to tag me at Elizabeth Underscore Welfare so we can encourage each other and stay connected on our sketchbook adventures. You can also follow me over on YouTube. On my channel, I share art practices, art approaches, ideas about creativity and art studio processes, take you on art adventures that I take by sketchbooks on and just all things creative that I have going on in my world that I share my followers. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I am so excited for you to have your own unique altered sketchbook that you can take anywhere you go and a process that you can repeat over and over again as you fill up that sketchbook to create new ones. I'll see you next time.