Make and Paint Your Own Sketchbooks - Easy! | Suzanne Allard | Skillshare
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Make and Paint Your Own Sketchbooks - Easy!

teacher avatar Suzanne Allard, Floral, Abstract & Creativity Teacher

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Class Intro

      2:08

    • 2.

      Project Video

      3:04

    • 3.

      Sketchbooks I've Made

      5:38

    • 4.

      Supplies

      4:43

    • 5.

      All About Paper

      10:07

    • 6.

      Painting the cover - Small book

      7:19

    • 7.

      Making holes - Small book

      6:24

    • 8.

      Assembling - Small book

      12:41

    • 9.

      Priming pages - Large book

      9:06

    • 10.

      Painting the cover - Large book

      14:22

    • 11.

      Making holes - Large book

      6:58

    • 12.

      Assembling - Large book

      11:53

    • 13.

      Wrap Up

      1:20

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About This Class

Make and Paint Your Own Sketchbooks!

Get ready to create your own sketchbooks from cover to cover!  I’ve scoured the resources to find the simplest, easiest method to make a quick sketchbook that won’t fall apart or take too much time.  These are fun because you can fully customize everything about them.  The size, the shape, the covers, the paper you choose, everything is up to you!

I’ll create two different covers, one floral and one abstract.  One is a smaller sketchbook with no coating on the paper and the other is larger with coated papers I show you how to make.

What you’ll get in this class:

  • Learn how to quickly and simply make a sturdy sketchbook.
  • Learn what the various customization options are.
  • Learn all about a huge variety of papers to choose from
  • Learn how to keep the supplies as simple and cost effective as possible.
  • Learn how to save money and have fun making your own sketchbooks.
  • Learn how to paint a floral and abstract cover using a wide variety of supplies

Who this class is for:

This class is for anyone who wants to learn an easy, fun and satisfying way to make sketchbooks.

Additional Resources:

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Suzanne Allard

Floral, Abstract & Creativity Teacher

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Transcripts

1. Class Intro: Hi, I'm Suzanne Allard. I'm a self taught artist. I didn't start painting until I was 52, 50, something like that. I always had done creative things, but I just was too scared to paint. I thought that was for other people. Sounds so silly. Now it does, but I get it and I get the fear involved in creating. Anyway, I manage the fear and I ph and it's still a daily challenge. But now I license my work, I sell my work, I teach classes and What else do I do? Seems like there's a lot that goes into having an art business, a lot of moving parts, but I love it, absolutely love it. Making sketchbooks just seem like a natural fit to what I do. Since so much of my classes are in sketchbooks, it just made a lot of sense. In this class, we are going to make two sketchbooks, a small one, and a larger one. If you're asking yourself, why in the world would I make a sketchbook when they're easily available at the stores. I think until you make it, you may not fully understand it. At least that's what happened to me. I started to make one because I thought, this is a neat idea. Then I realized that they're so customizable. You can choose the shape that you want it. You can choose what you want on the cover. You can choose what kind of paper. Most importantly, what kind of paper you want inside what thickness, what tooth, do you want rougher, do you want it smooth? Depending on how you want to use that book? Do you want it for travel? How many pages do you want in it? Just the flexibility that it gives you. And it's a really fun project. I figured out how to do it with minimal supplies, minimal hassle. So I put that together in a class and I just had to share it. Join me and let's get making some sketchbooks, which hopefully encourage you to fill them. 2. Project Video: Hello. You probably have taken some of my classes where we work in sketch books a lot, and it seems natural to me to figure out how to make sketchbooks and was that something that I thought would be fun? And it turns out that it is a lot of fun. It gives you the ability to customize completely what you want in the sketch how you want the sketchbooks. Size, thickness, paper choices, you know, the shape of it, whether you want portrait or landscape. There's just so many as I started to do that. And then I started to realize, my gosh, there's so many fun ways like, you know, making the cover. Of course, I had to make my covers really colorful and fun. So I started out making some of the more like traditional books like getting into bookbinding a little bit. And I found that was just too fussy. It for me, and I love bookbinding. I think it's beautiful. And I'll show you a couple I made, but I want the sketchbook to be a playful place and I don't want it to feel too precious. After spending all this time making this elaborate book, it started to feel too precious. I love these, and I researched and experimented with all different kinds of ways to make sketchbooks, to make it quick easy and not fussy so that we can just play in them and use them for maybe samples or swatches or whatever and not feel like, I can't ruin that sketchbook or whatever is silly to get in our heads. So That's what I did. I put together the simplest way that I think after trying and a lot of trial and error. For this project, we are going to follow a process that is the simplest one I found, I believe, no glue to put together a sketchbook that allows you to choose what paper you want in it, what cover you want on it, meaning the cover paper, paint your own cover and a quick and easy anything you want on it. And We're going to make actually two sketch books. I have one whole series on the smaller one and then we'll do a larger one. This is going to end up when it's open being 11 by 15. I help you join me in creating these two and then putting them also in taking a picture and putting them in the project section. I love seeing what you come up with. And I also have supply lists in the resources. Let's get going and make some sketch books. 3. Sketchbooks I've Made: Okay, let's take a look at some of my sketchbook making adventures. So there are these kind of more bound books which I wanted to try them, but they are really involved. And what happened is you know, I bought all of these supplies. I probably spent well over $100, maybe more, and then I made these and it was fun. I'm glad I did it, but because there were so much work, it became a little bit more precious than I wanted them to feel. So I think they have their place, but I said, Okay, well, that was that. I'll show them to you. This was, I think my very first one, and I just did a painted, what this is called. There's the name for this part that's glued in there. And then I just started sketching. And this one, even though it's watercolor paper. And so this one I obviously, I'm not feeling precious about, and it was fun. Doesn't lay flat. I mean, I'm not the best, you know, I'm not an expert bookbinder. So that was number one. And then I think this was another one, and I I made it I had fun with the cover. I wanted this one to be just play kind of a theme where I would not be precious and I would not worry about, you know, I was this was going to be my guiding thing. Are you having fun? You can see my construction, you know, was lacking. And then I played with some landscapes in this one. But I used full watercolor paper in this and it's pretty heavy. I mean, it's pretty thick. And so I since, you know, gravitated more to the 90 pound water colored paper. But I was playing in this and as it turned out, this bread actually got licensed by for some paper products and wrapping paper, so you just never know. But I haven't done much with that. Then this one was like, Okay, I did a really good job on it. I mean, not if you're an expert folk finder, but it's pretty darn good. And then I said, what am I I do now? It feels too precious and I really like this kind of thing lately, so I've been doing this in it. But then I haven't done much more, and I'm just getting over the whole like, don't be precious about it, Suzanne. Just enjoy it. But I wanted some much easier and simple and less precious feeling sketchbooks. So I started learning different stitches in different ways and glue and trial and error. And so that's what we're going to make in this in this class. And is actually these two sketchbooks we're going to make. So this one was another one I made that I learned that the coating I put on the paper just made it too thick. And I had a different recipe. I'll explain it. But I have two different colored pages on the spread because I was just inging it. As I am known to do, but it's still going to be great for making big spreads of things. It just made it a little too heavy and unwieldy. So all those lessons learned led me to these, and I'll show you we're going to actually make these two. We're going to paint the covers and everything. And that's half the fun, if not most of fun. This one, I will show you just was a little different in the style of cover in case you wanted to try it. And this might make more sense to come back and watch this after you after you've made these. But in these two, the ones we're making, the cover is just the whole entire one piece of art. This one so that the cover could come off the edge a little bit. You can probably see this seam here. I took one piece of art, same thing, but then I cut it here and here, and then I just put took the first page of the book and glued it to it. Can you see the page here? Glued it to this piece, and then this is painter's tape. You know, this is the green frog tape, and then I painted the tape. That's just another way but I decided that was also adding more time and hassle. I wanted to really make these simple. I wanted to make them so that we could use them for whatever and just be messy about it or click about it, and not too fussy. But I just wanted to show you why that one looks different. All right. So that's the extent of my sketchbook making adventures, and let's get to making these pretty little things. It's fine. 4. Supplies: All right. So for supplies, I really wanted to keep this simple. You see some sketchbook videos on YouTube and is like this supplies, you know, 20 different things. I thought, Good Lord, you know, we're not getting into the book binding business. So we're just making an but adequate and sketchbook for our use. You need paper, obviously. And I talked about this in paper choices, but whatever weight you've decided on, whether you want the lighter weight for inside the sketchbook, or whether you want to use the heavier paper. You just need whatever size you want. Your sketch book is obviously going to be half of that. I have done sometimes where, you know, I want sort of a more longer sketchbook. I cut off some of that and then just use this for scrap. So I wanted it to be more square. I don't remember what I do with that sketch book, but I cut off some of this. But to keep your first one simple, I would just use a nine by 12, you know, pad of paper. So your paper, some sort of protecting for your surface, you could use a kitchen cutting board if you don't have a cutting mat, most people probably don't. And then this tool is pretty, you know, You may have something in the garage toolbox or in your kitchen that is pointy like this, maybe a really thick needle. If you happen to have this kind of thing, some upholstery kit. I'm going to give you a link to an Amazon kit that has all this stuff in it and I think it's like $7 for this. This might even come with the thread. It's pretty amazing. It comes with the bone folder, which we aren't going to use because we're doing saddle stitch, but if you do learn other stitches and other book binding, you could you you would use the bone folder to fold your sheets. But anyway, you need something to be able to pierce the pages. Then you need thread. You know, this is the wax thread, but you don't need this much and you don't even need. I think you could use For our purposes, again, we're not making books to sell them. We're not concerned with them lasting being used a lot in terms of opening lots of abuse. I mean, they're going to get abuse with paint. But you could just if you've got some heavy duty thread, you could try that and see how it works if you didn't want to buy the wax. I've seen that at craft stores, but the kit that comes with this is pretty inexpensive. The only time you would need to actually cut on a mat and a blade knife is, I'll show you at the end is if you want to trim the edges of the pages on the sketchbook, but not necessary. Really, bare bones, you need something to poke the holes, something to sew with, a, a largest needle, not this big, but a good size needle and your paper. Of course, we're going to be painting the cover of these sketchbooks. Then you need your painting stuff and your tools to make pretty things. But I wanted to find these simplest. There's so many ways to stitch sketchbooks and overcomplicate this. And I just wanted you to have a way to make a lay flat sketchbook that didn't require bunches and bunches of supplies because it's for our our personal use, and it's for painting, not writing, like most books are videos that are out there on how to make a sketch book. It seems like they're more for drawing and thin paper, and that doesn't work for us. So even a needle this size is all you need. You don't need a super thick one like that came with this kit. Let's get to it. 5. All About Paper: Let's talk about the paper for the Sketchbook. That is something you could probably talk about for, I don't know a long time because there are so many options. I would say though that this is an opportunity to use really inexpensive paper. I would not tell yourself that you had to use any certain paper, although I've seen people use the handmade papers and really little sketch books. That's pretty. But I just a few here. I mean, I could literally make the stack like a foot tall and talk to you about them. But I concentrated on what I think are good papers for a low price. This is the Strathmore 200 series. 90 pound. Now, when I talk about pound, that's the thickness of the paper, the weight of it. Typical watercolor paper, your standard watercolor paper like this is 140 pound, and it is what you see most often, it's very heavy. Okay. I don't like using that for the interior or my sketchbook too much. I've tried it and it just ends up so thick. I mean, you can if you only use six sheets. But I just even when I've been buying sketch books in the last year or so, I like to buy the ones that are 90 pound paper on the inside, which are a little harder to find, which makes this whole thing another reason to do it because I can I can use any paper I want. We're going to make two sketchbooks. One with this, which is why there's none left because we're going to use it. And We're going to make the cover though with the heavier weight. Makes sense, that the cover would be a little heavier, and we're going to use the same size. Nine by 12 the standard. This will be the sheets on the inside, and then this will be the cover that will paint. By the way, this Amazon basic watercolor, I thought I'd try it and it's pretty impressive for the price. I also like But they call it a book. Usually they're called pads, but I don't know if it's their process. The glue, the amount of glue they put here, but it almost is like a sketch book, except that it wouldn't I don't think it would hold up, you know, once you put media in there. This is just a thin layer glue. It was kind of funny that I, you know, bought it to play with it and It's pretty sturdy the pad part of it. The other thing that I would just say for your interior pages to consider is you may or may not know that watercolor has two sides. Who knew, right? It has the front and the back. I grabbed this paper to show you some of them have no difference on the front and the back, and some have a lot of difference. This is an example of one with a lot of difference that probably would not use in a sketchbook. Unless you're putting Jessel on it anyway, then it doesn't matter at all. But if you wanted to just use the paper plane, this is a really inexpensive. I think this is from Walmart and maybe $6 for 30 or 20 sheets, and it's the lighter weight. It's not 90, but it's less than 140. But just be aware, see all the texture on this side. On this side, it's really smooth. You say, well, so what? Well, it's not a big deal. It really isn't. But if you've got your sketchbook like this, and then the next page, so here's the back of this sheet and it's smooth and then this one has the grain on it, that could be a cool thing. You could say, well, you know what? In this sketchbook, I'm going to do certain types of paintings on the smooth side, which is more like a mixed media paper, and then certain more water colory ones on the one that has the rougher texture. You could embrace that change, but I just wanted to make you aware that some papers are like that. Whereas, let's see here. This and these are all I picked up all inexpensive papers. This is the B paper company. I've got almost all of this on Amazon, I think all of it, 90 pound and I'll put links in the in the supply list. This one I like because it's that ivory color and can you see how the texture is the same front to back? Maybe you can't see that, but it is. So when you're doing your sketchbook, the surface will seem the same on all the sheets. So there's no right or wrong, know what you're doing, or you know what you want to do. I will say do not get this. I have gotten sketch books by this. This is on Amazon, but this is the worst watercolor paper, I think I've ever seen. I guess it's for kids. It's blue, first of all, it's like purple, and it's. What I've done with it is I actually used it for because it is lighter weight, 90 pound, which is why I tried it is I use it for collage. So What else did I want to show you? I'll show you this paper. This is Canson Mixed Media Rugh, 114 pounds. So again, less than the 140, so have a nice flexible feel. Both sides are the same. But that will be the case with mixed media paper. So that would lend itself well to sketchbook paper. And then the large sketch book, we're going to use this, which is a 90 pound watercolor paper from Blick. They're Blick essential, so inexpensive, and it's a nice paper, which is the same on both sides, even though I'm going to put some es on that. I'll show you that. So really, It's a time to just think about, what's the sketchbook going to be used for? Is it going to be? Are you going to put eso on it? Are you going to do acrylic painting in it? Like, let me see. We go grab some of these. I might be helpful to give you some examples. Because I haven't started painting much in the handmade ones yet. But like this is watercolor paper and a watercolor effect. Okay? So I would not jestle that. But this I did jestle because I didn't want all that paint soaking in. I was just in process. I did make the sketchbook, but this is such a such a process. And then it ends up having the effect it becomes precious, which is what we don't want to have happen in the sketchbook. So I was a fun project, but it was too much work. This is actually the B paper company, the paper that I bought big sheets of it. And you can see well, I'll just tell you I did not just this, the paint soaked in. I don't think I did this page either. I was messing around with some water colors. So I guess I have not just owed any of these pages yet. Yeah. This was fun, but challenging. So that's why I'm just going with the simpler ones that are not precious. All right. So I will list these papers. The ones that I think are probably the best options. And then you know, I would just recommend looking for a lighter than 140 pound for your inside and the student grade base grade type paper. Sometimes it's called essentials. Sometimes it's called student. Stram they do 200 series is good and then there's 300 series and 400 series. You can just stick with the 200. This one's already in expensive. This one was really inexpensive. Like I said, just as long as you don't mind that two sides are different. This is Yucky. And this is fantastic if you want to make the whole thing watercolor paper the heavier watercolor paper. It's nice paper. Is same on both sides. Yeah, that gives you some options. And I will also mention you can use, especially if you're going to use a eso to on the sheets, you could try just like a heavier copy paper and see what happens because by the time you treat both sides of that, it's going to have some body to it and some texture to it. If you wanted to experiment for your first sketchbook and just grab six sheets of copy paper and just sew them, that would be, perfectly adequate. Make a really nice, small, lightweight sketchbook. All right. Let's get playing. 6. Painting the cover - Small book: All right. So I think I'm going to use this one. I don't think I've made one out of this paper yet. And it's about the same texture on both sides, or at least it's not super smooth on one side. It's 90 pound, which is that lighter weight that I like in a sketchbook. And then I have this 140 pound. This might be that Amazon basics, but it's the thicker one. So I'll use one of those for the cover. I get that off for us to paint. Then I'm going to make this just six pages, which will be 12. Keep it nice and small. I think it's fun to have these smaller ones. They're great for travel. There's three sheets. Four, five, six. Well, that almost uses this up because I guess I used up. Something else. I just have one sheet left? I do. So I'm going to go ahead and make it seven. All right. So seven sheets of paper. Which hopefully I won't get any pain on. All right. So we're going to take our seven sheets and they're ready to work with. But first, we're going to get our cover ready, which is just the sheet of 140 pounds that I mentioned. You can use the same, by the way, you can just use another sheet of the paper you chose for the inside. There's nothing you can just take one of those sheets. I just like the cover to be a little heavier. So that's what I'm doing. I'm just going to paint this in the most loose fun way. You can do anything you want with this. So what should we do? I have this orange ink that I was doing something else with. So I guess we could play with that. Send its out. A little bit of green ink. This is just a chip brush from Michael's, but you can get them at the hardware store online. And I got some white there. Yeah, you know, I'll just get some Magenta. This Magenta from my Nova color bundle is one of my favorite favorite colors. You'll see why. Look at that. Yeah. I mean, this is just the cover in my sched book. So you could paint it before hand like this or afterwards. You could not paint it at all. You could just write something on it. This brush is very loose and scratchy. Combine that a little bit and get kind of an orange color. All right. I don't think I want so much scratchiness. I mean, it was fun, but let's try the fan brush. I'm just grabbing stuff. Taking those. Basically, the colors I have there had some acrylic ink, some yellowly, kind of Indian yellow actually, it was orange. I can take some of it here. I could stop at any point. And of fun what the brush does with the ink, isn't it? I think I want I'm thinking that, this will be the front cover, but actually this could be the front cover, but I want a little more magenta there. All right. I could put cran there. I could put some oil passed down. It's not quite dry over there. So I want my sketch book to convey to be a place to play. So it makes sense that my cover would kind of be playful, right? Okay. Now, what we could do, if you want your cover to be just a little protected, you could sish this when it's, or you could put a mat medium on it, which is something like this. Basically, it's a protector, or if you've got workable fixative spray because I talk about that a lot. You could use that. You could also just say, what? It's a sketch book. It's going to get paint on it and who cares? Those are the options. And then we'll start poking holes in these pages and putting this thing together. 7. Making holes - Small book : All right. Now that this is dry, I did end up putting a little bit of the medium on it. I don't know why. Just because I got it out to show it to you, that's probably why. I've got my sheets ready and now what we need is the fall something to poke holes. We need a ruler to be able to measure. And it can help to pfold the center one. I did that. I just if you can see the center line, but It's sort of there as a visual. And now I'm going to line everything up and use my clips. I think it's pretty lined up. Cover. That's funny. Do you see the difference? They're both nine by 12 pads, but the cover is a little bit larger, which is actually okay. So I'm going to have to get these set first. And then we get them. No, that's not working. Let's just do it this way. I'm just looking here at the edge and here to make sure pretty lined up. Now that's lined up, I'm pushing down on it and I'm going to get my clips. I've got the gold ones just because they're here. You can use binder, whatever you got. And now we're going to take our ruler and our goal is just the five marks down the center. First, we need to know our center and this is a nine by 12. Pad. I realized. This is why in the next one I put the clips on after I measure. But that's okay. I'll show you both ways. So nine by 12 pad that means that 6 " is our center. Is going to mark that. We can just mark this one at this end. And then I'm going to lightly make a line connecting those two, so I have my center line. Really lightly because it's just not that lightly. Oh, my gosh. There's nothing there. I wonder if I paint on this pencil. It wouldn't be the first time I've stuck a pencil in wet paint to make marks. Okay. Now we're going to go for the five marks down the middle. Somewhat evenly spaced. The easiest way to do that. For me, is going with the halfway mark, which this is nine by 12. And this does not need to be precise. It really doesn't. This is just a M play sketchbook for our own use. 4.5 is there. Then I'm looking for two marks on this side of it and two marks on that for a total of five. That's why I like to start in the middle. Depending on the size of our sketchbook, we can see if would 2 " fit? If we did 2 ", it winds us out way out here, so close to the edge. I think I'm going to do an inch and a half. That means an inch and half here and an inch and a half here. That'll be more evenly spaced. Then I'm going to go here and do the same thing. Inch and a half from here is right there and right there. Now you see I one, two, three, four, five, somewhat evenly spaced. We don't really worry about the ends here, the paper could come to here. I wouldn't probably let it come way out here, so that's why I didn't do like 1 " marks. If I done 1 " marks, they'd have been like here and here, and we'd have a big gap here. So you're really eyeballing it. Just shooting for the five marks. I'm just erasing my line because I don't need it on my sketchbook spread that this page will be. Right? Got my five marks? Now we grab our all and you've got a cutting mat where you can use the back of a pad, something to protect whatever you're working on and keep your hands away, fingers away. Gulls through pretty easily. Just like that. You could try some other kitchen implement maybe. But this kit that I found has a lot of has all the tools you need not very much. To make as many sketch books as you want, really. Okay. So those are done. 8. Assembling - Small book: Now, our thread and our needle. I already had this piece of bd. I think it's too long, but that's okay. I well it up. And I don't know, three or four lengths of this is not four lengths is too many one, two, three is, I think. I keep eyeballing it and then saying, I should really because it depends on the stitch you're doing. I also depends on the size of the sketch book, but right. The first thing we're going to do is from the inside. There's our cover, but from the inside, I'm going to go through, we're going to leave like a two inch tail two to three inch. Maybe I didn't make that hole big enough for this giant needle. I don't really need such a giant needle. And then I don't want to pull that through. So I just find it's easier to grab a piece of tape just to keep it from sliding through. Something like that, that way. It's secure and when we tug on it doesn't come through the whole. We're on the outside now. So think of this as you're coming this way or either way. You're going out and back and then out and back. Doesn't matter which way you go. You're here on the outside. You're going to go to either this one or this one doesn't matter. Go back in. And then back out the next hole. Yeah, this needle. You don't want to do it in the switch needles. I just too big. Yeah. That's why I think I was using the smaller needle before, and I thought, I don't need this thick needle. I don't want holes that big. I don't need holes that big. Okay. Much better. Now I've gotten to the end. The last hole, so I'm going back through and I'm keeping this snug. The first time you forget to keep it snug and then you can go back and tighten it just like shoe laces. But now that I've done this a few times, I'm getting used to keeping it snug. I'm going back in the middle. And now we're going out the other end. Super easy. Back to the last hole. Snugging it. Just give it a tug, not too much. You know where you rip your paper. And then back in that. Heading back to the middle again. Okay. Now I've got one more space left. I'm going to go through it, and I'll be outside my sketchbook. Actually, I can take these off now. They're not necessary anymore. Making some clatter. Now I'm just going to tie it either end. I've got it nice and snug, but if you don't, go back through and just feed it, tighten it from both ends, the way that you might tighten shoe laces. I'm just going to hold this here, go underneath here, and then over it. To tie a knot. That secures that. Then I'm taking my needle off. This is where most sketchbook instructions tell you to feed this back into the sketchbook and have your knot a knee inside, but we're painting in here. We don't want knots and threads here. I do the opposite. Now I re thread with this little tail. And to go ahead and secure it here either side, we'll go to the other side. To a little. I could have left a longer tail. I forget that the needle is super long. And then I'm going back through. Now I've got them both. I just tie them. I like to leave a little tail, but if you don't, you can work it underneath. I just think it makes it sort of a handmade feel. All right. So you can just take the thing and fold it, or you can take the cover first. And like this, even it up here and pinch it. The other end. Got both ends pinched. So I've got the cover separately, and I'm folding it out. Some people say it just makes it easier to get your fold in the middle that way. I don't know. I've done it both ways. And as long as you take your time, it's hard to get to the middle of it. So at that point, I'm going to go just fold it. Pinch it right here in the middle. Pinch pinch. Pinch. And you're going to end up putting this a stack of books on this overnight. You can stand on it, anything to help you get that crease. But this is creasing prey well. That's because we don't use too many sheets, which also makes it a really lightweight sketch book. Well, now, I like to go through and train my sheets a bit. So I'll do this even when I get a commercial sketchbook, go through and press sheets so that when you go to use it, it's kind of pre folded. There's our middle one. No ugly not in there. It so much pain in my hands. Okay. Yeah, with the idea. That helps too. And then I like it just this way. You can see the sheets stick out because as they're being folded at different places, the middle ones are stick out. That doesn't bother me for this kind. Sometimes I do trim it. I'll go ahead and trim this one to show you. So Trim, just take the sheets like that away from the cover because we don't want to trim the cover. And I probably wouldn't even do this until you left it overnight because it'll be nice much flatter for you to see what you're cutting. But I'm going to go ahead and show you I wonder if I can mimic leaving it overnight by I don't know if this will work with the ruler, but let's try it. By kind of securing these here. Yeah. Okay. And then you take you definitely want a cutting mat or cutting board. Line up where you want your cut to be. How banging my head against my camera holder. Further. All right. I'm going to go for it because it doesn't need to be perfect. The imperfect sketchbook. Then a blade knife. Be very careful. I needs to be sharp. The main thing is holding down this really well. Because when I've done it before and I didn't, it you start going diagonally. Take your time, your pressure is down and you're going to mind it up here and makes basically several passes like this. And sometimes things will come off, and sometimes they won't, and you can just go like that. But if you take your time, I take those was much better than I don't know feeling like you have to do this quickly. You could also use scissors, but it's just harder to get a straight edge. Again, you don't have to do any of this. I'm going to show you in one of these. You could get C and not even perfect because the other end, the other side was That's because I didn't leave it overnight. Yeah. So leave it overnight before you put the edge. I mean, it's closer than it was. But I'm going to leave it that way because I don't care. All right. Another sketch book to fill and so light weight. I mean, so great for travel. Because, you know, if you're traveling, you're not going to fill a 60 page sketch book anyway. All right. This one's going under some books so it can get nice and wet. Sometimes I stand on them. Now, you'll have a sketchbook. I'm like, anybody else's. How fun? All right, go forth and make sketchbooks. 9. Priming pages - Large book: So for the large sketchbook, I'm going to use this Blick essentials, 1151590 pounds. The nice weight. I like that it's Well, I'm going to the texture is pretty similar on both sides. I haven't tried it without any esa because I just got this and I'm making the sketchbook with Jessa, but it seems like a really nice paper. But often when I'm working my sketch books, I like to seal the page unless I'm using the watercolor look with the gah or acrylic. I like to seal the page with Jess or paint so that all the paint doesn't soak in. So I just depends on what kind of creating I'm doing. But for this sketchbook, I wanted to make one with the treatment or the surface sealed. Like I said, I normally do that with my sketchbooks. The ones that I buy. You've probably seen me paint them and jestle them. I have a whole YouTube on how and why I just je slew my sketchbooks. But then I learned from another YouTuber Sandy Hester, and well, not that I'm a tuber. She's truly a utuber, but anyway, she since she was making her sketchbook, she pretreated it with this mix of medium. I don't know if she used Jess. I think she just used medium and paint. So that gave me the idea to mix my concoction of Matt medium, Jess water and a little bit of off white because I like the ivory colored paper more than white white paper. Just all personal preference. The point is that making your own sketchbook really allows you to customize the whole thing from the type of paper you're using, the color that it is, the treatment that you have on it, if any, what the cover looks like, the size of it, the thickness of it, all up to you. That's what's so fun. Next, we're going to show you the concoction mixed up and we'll start treating these sealing this paper. I think I have enough here though, 15 sheets to make one without doing that with the plain paper. That way, if I want to do a watercolor approach, I can and if I don't, then I can put my mix or Jess or medium on the pages. I think Sandy Hester, I think she used more of a medium. I like the Jess because it gives a graininess, often called tooth to the page. And it just medium is kind of slippery and just, you know, every again, personal preference. So let's start putting my stuff on these pages. So you can see what that's like, this one, and I'm going to paint. I could leave it as is. Obviously. This is a watercolor paper. I like the color. I don't really like let me show you, white, white, for some reason. I prefer sort of an ivory. I like that it comes in that ivory color. But since I'm usually using acrylic and I don't want all the paint to soak into the paper, Acrylic or acro guash, I'm going to This is a just a I eyeballed it as far as what I put in here or how much I put in here. I put in Gesso to help seal it, and then I put in a little bit of buff. Let me get the paint. Liquid tex, basics. Just to keep that ivory color because Jess so white unbleached titanium. And then just to extend it a little bit. I've done it with and without this mat medium. I'm trying the mat last few times to see if I like it. It just maybe gives me a little more. And then I also added some water because it was too thick. I don't really want a thick coat. In fact, I can wet my brush because I don't want my pages getting really thick. That's why I used the 90 pound paper. So that would defeat my purpose if I funk them up with a lot of material. But I do want a thin layer to seal it. And I could just use Matt medium. Some people do that, which is really thin doesn't add any bulk. But I find that it then you try to paint over that and it gives some weird effects which maybe people want. But I don't like it makes the paint slimy in spots depending on the paint. I was trying it with the vinyl paints the other day and it was strange. Anyway, I'm not being precise. I don't even care if little bits of things get in there too much because this get book. I'm going to do this on all six pages, and then I'll flip them and do the same. And let them dry. Let's do another one? I just had a drop cloth here on the floor. And tab my brush in some water, Tab it in some of my mixture. The reason the first time I did this, I did not make a mixture. I just squirted right on the page, a little bit of eso, little bit of paint, a little bit of medium. You can probably guess what happened. The pages were all a little bit different color. When you put them in a sketch book, and you open it up, again, I don't care because I'm going to paint over it, but I have this side that's a little bit more tan or off white and this one the left side is more white, and the spreads are not the same, which you know, I'm not trying to be precise here, but that's a little too I don't know. When you open your sketchbook, you kind of want to two sides. Although I was about to say you wanted to be the same by Alp and end up painting them differently. So who knows? At least this way, I've got the stuff premixed. And I can, you know, grab it and go and not although I try to think. I think it was probably mostly Jess. So I'm going to try to give you some I would say it was I did three parts, Jess. To one part medium and one part water fish. Then a few squares of the color, if you want one. Often, I start with a a fluorescent pink base. I might make one of these with that mixture. Just this same thing, but instead of adding the unbleached titanium, just adding some fluorescent. Or I might just when these are all dry and that they're in the book. I I want to do that on a page. Just put some floc in on there, watered down. If you mind getting this kind of stuff on your hands, you might want to use latex gloves. All right. I will come back when I've got all of these painted and both sides them Also, I started with this base for the color for the cover. This is a 140 pound, and I just did like we were just talking about, actually, Jess with some fluorescent and looks like I've thrown in a bit of orange in here, too, which I like to do. I could leave this as is as a cover. But maybe we'll come back and do something to it to paint the cover. Okay. I will see you when done with this and when it's all dry. 10. Painting the cover - Large book : All right. Let's do something fun on this. It's going to be the schedule cover. And I thought I would try out I've just got these big fat liquid tex, paint markers. And I maybe sort of draw some kind of loosed flow Let's just see what happens. That's all I have in mind, You know, I'm gonna draw with the pink, even though there's already glass and pink here. Just be really loose 'cause it's a sketchbook cover. So Let's make some shapes. And holding this this big fat nib in different ways to see what it does. Trying to hold it loosely too. Using a big tool like it's like using a big brush. It forces you to loosen up. This green is. But maybe it's a good starting point. Kind of the idea of believes. Maybe. I've got some red. This is a. Let me tell you what the green was lime green, avid lime green, a Crimson. C. We end up covering a lot of this and paint, but who knows? Maybe it'll make some marks I like. I like the the fat. The way this is turning out. I'll leave some mostly pink mas outliner. I could do some little thy things, too, why not? I will do a YouTube video on these markers in more depth with kind of the things the marks and and so forth. Especially as I learn more about them. The Trika Those are a little too square for me. I like different shapes. It's really dark. But I could mix it with white. I'd have to use a brush, though. I'll just use it for some accents. I'll try just pale pink. So leaves. It really matches the background, so it's not showing up. Yeah. I figured I could have maples yellow. I guess I'm using all the liquidx colors to see. This kind of background, maybe. It's funny, isn't it creating like my hand just started making it a background. When I put it down. So I guess I'll just follow what my hand wants to do. Sometimes that turns out well, sometimes not. I think most often I like what happens when I give up some control. I can just you can't hear it, but my dog, she has a rescue. Mix. She has a dog door. And when she comes in the dog door, she comes running up the stairs, like she's like a little kid like, I'm back, you know, like like we might have missed her and not noticed she was outside. And I just heard that sound of her. It makes kind of this carpet on the basement stairs, so it makes kind of a it's become like a happy sound to hear her running in and I know she's out there in the living room looking for me like, Di didn't you notice I'm back? I went outside. Well, I think I didn't use these two neurtrals. This is what is this one? Un bleached titanium and parchment. Um The Naples, a yellow ended up being a good neutral. Let's just see what this does if you know what I can do. Yeah. This will soften the turquoise maybe, let's see. It's dry already, so I'm not ruining my nib. Yeah, I think that needed a settling down. In some places. I won't do it in all of them. Maybe a little settling down on the lime green, too. I like my colors right, as you know, but they can't all be. Saying, Look at me. Then there's Get a headache. Let some bits come through that are bright. They dry really fast. I did learn that I watched some reviews, and that was one of the things people liked about them compared to other paint markers. I mean, I love my Pascas. But I wanted to these tiny bits for the large one. Not enough to, you know, say you one way or the other, but I just thought I'd give something to try. I was just thinking, should I challenge myself to just do this whole thing with the with these markers? We'll see. If I feel like I don't want to do anything else to it, then I can leave it. I do want some metallic gold though. These are my favorite metallic gold pens I talk about all the time. I'll try to put the links to some of the stuff in the description. I guess we're using the black watercolor pad, the liquid markers. So the gold pen. So I think I want to do some squigglies and maybe some dots. Maybe with a thinner one a bit of outline leaves or something. Why are you so stuck? Holy cow? Okay. It made me wonder if it was gonna be dried out. Oh. Maybe something pure. Well, it's not boring. Was that dry and start putting the sketch book together. I could always add to this or do something else to it. You know, after I've sewn the sketch book together. I don't have to do at all now. Just seeing if I go back, you know, to make in some places it less transparent by using a second coat. J for some headed this and that. T. I do like how these force you to loosen up. You can't you can't really I mean, I suppose you could control these if you really wanted to, but they lend themselves to looseness. Okay. Put it down, let it dry. This is the last mark. Okay. Wait this one. Oh, my goodness. All right. Let's put that dry. 11. Making holes - Large book: Okay. So I did mess around with this cover a little bit more. I think I decided it was two fluorescent D, so I toned it down with some green ink and put some little metallic. I just have f of it. So whatever you've got for your cover, you're just going to put it with your pages. Here's all my pre treated both sides pages. It did make it a little thicker, which makes sense. So I don't know if we'll see how that works out. The other one that I've done was I use thicker paper and then put this on and it was just too thick. This looks like it would be okay. But maybe I'll go back to just using the plain paper and then covering the sheets if I want to. All right. We've got our sheets. We're just going to line them up, best we can. All four sides. Then we're going to find the middle here, which I know this is the 11 by 15 pad. So I know that 15 is going to be move this 7.5. I'm going to just mark some 7.5 marks down the middle here. So I can get my mid point. You could just do one at the top of one at the bottom, but now I'm going to make a line. I'm going to make it faint because this will be a sketchbook spread. This whole process, I hope I've conveyed not to be too fussy and turn this into something stressful. This is just for our use. It's meant to be imperfect, just like the art that's going in it. Now I'm going to find five holes along here, somewhat even based and Basically, the way I've done that is I find my midpoint, which since this is 11, it's 5.5. Then I've either said, well, we 2 " apart work, or should I do 1.5 ", whatever the size I'm working with to get a total of five marks. I've already got one here, which means I need two on this side and two on this side. If I do 2 ", let's see, that's the half, the half, that would be there, and there. I think that works. Let's do one, two, and one, two. Then this way, one, two, one, two. Depending on the size paper, you might if it's a much smaller one, you might just do 1.5 " or even 1 ", it's a little one. But your goal is to try to get your five marks along here and now I can actually erase this line so that it's not on my sketchbook spread because all I really need with these five marks. A Okay. And just in case I've fast this, I'm going to make sure I've still at m as even as I can. On both sides top to bottom. And then now I'm going to it helps. You really want to be able to clip this somehow when you're doing your holes. And you could actually clip it before we just measured, you know, if you're worried about it moving. To keep it secure. Move on. Do it this way. You can use binder clips. These guys, doesn't matter. I just have the gold ones here because I use them a lot in my sketchbook spreads. Okay. Now we can not worry about it moving, and I'm going to take the all. I've got a cutting mat here. If you don't have a cutting mat, just get maybe a cutting board, something that could even be where we took The watercolor paper pad. These backs of these pads are really tough. I'm not going to say you should have pie furniture underneath it, but it's a pretty good surface. You're just going to go in trying to stay on the line that is the center line that is somewhat erased. And go right in to your mark. Again, there's nothing magical about being right at that 1.5 inch mark. What's more important is that it is on the center line. So if I made it up here or down here, so what? I do want to try to stay on the center line. And it goes in really easily. If you don't have an all and you have a really big needle that could work. But I will put a link to this kit in the supplies list. It's a really kind of nice kit for the amount of things, exactly what you need, no more, no less. Okay. Next step will be to start stitching. 12. Assembling - Large book : So far as stitching, I've got the wax thread and I'm using white because it's a sketch book. I'm going to don't want a colored thread in there. Lengthwise, it seems like just about two times, but I like to go over because I don't want to run out. Maybe one, two, three, I'm using almost four lengths of the spine. Then take a needle. We're going to thread our needle. And we're going to go right in that middle hole and not going to not it. We're going to leave a tail. You're going to see how easy easy this is. Okay. And then if it's easier for you to put a piece of tae on it. Maybe to keep it from escaping. I did have an escape one time, not a big deal. You just thread it again, but I do want to leave enough to be able to tie in. So a couple inches, 3 ". Okay. Now we're going to go in one direction and then the other. We're going to come up in this hole, we're going to go down this way, and then we'll go back this way. In this side, we're going to go in that next hole. Okay. And then see it does help to have a little tape because I just yanked on it, and it would have gone. And then we're going to go back back to the outside again. And then I'm going to go back in. And then back into this center hole again. Kind of back to where we started. You probably guessed it? Go in the other direction. Then into the center. I'm sorry. No. I have to go back out this way first. I just remember you're going out back and then out and back. Set Although making mistakes is how you learn and then you untie and do it again. So now I'm going back towards the middle again. I am keeping the pressure. We can tighten this in and tighten it that in. At the end, I like to tighten everything up. So if you pull too hard though, and especially if your paper, is just plain paper, not coated like this, you can tear it done that. So tight, but not to the point you're ripping your paper. Now we're going back out and you can see that we've got something on all the holes. So at this point, before I tie that, I do want to snug it up. Yes. Find where where it's loose. Can basically feel and pull until you get it tight. Then here I'm going to do a knot. It doesn't matter which end that you let me show you that again. I be hard to see what the pattern of the sketch cover. You can do another one, go underneath one side or the other, and tie a knot. Then most sketchbook instructions will tell you then to feed this back inside because they want the thread and not on the inside, but of course, we're painting on the inside, so we don't want that. I do the opposite. I take the little tail that we left in here and also do a little n just to secure it, and then feed it back to the outside. I mean, you could leave it in there, but I want that spread as clean as possible, and I don't care if I've got threads and knots out here. Now I'm going to take both of these just to secure it again and tie them again. You could tie as many times as you want. I like leaving a little I don't know bit here. I think it looks I like a handmade sketchbook, like that. But of course, if you don't like that, you could try to leave it under there and glue it and things like that. But, it is stitched. Now we can take these clips off. I've seen some people who say that it's easier to take the cover and hold it this way. First, like on itself. I seems to make sense because you're kind of precreasing the cover. But you could try try it this way one time and try it another way in a time. Basically, you just want to make sure these hedges are similar. Again, we're not being our goal is not to make a fussy sketch book of a perfect sketch book. You can see what my pencil mark is there. And of course if you'll notice that when we fold this, we have these different lengths of paper because we're folding here. And they end differently here. That's okay. That's part of the handmade look, and if you really don't like it, I'll show you what you can do about it. Now I just I pinched that a little bit. Pinch here a little bit. That's folding pretty nicely. Now I'm going to lay down and pinch across the middle. And we'll end up putting this in I usually put it on underneath a stack of books overnight. So like that to get it flat more flat, but that's actually, especially for all the material I put on those sheets. It's actually doing really well. You can kind of work it a little bit more. And the like I said, a night under some heavy books really helps. And also not using too many sheets. There we go. You can leave these sheets like this. You don't bother me because when I'm opening, I mean, painting, they're obviously it's not a problem. If it bothers you, then all you do is go back to where you were, and for this, you do need a cutting mat or cutting board. Take a straight edge. Be very careful. And a lad knife. I don't really want to cut this one because I like the way the edges came out. But I'm just going to show you the trick is that you want to apply a lot of pressure here and be very careful. And you're just going down like this. I said, I'm not going to do it, but you're pressing and then just keep doing it and little bits will come off and I've done this where I wasn't holding with my left hand really hard. And it came out all uneven. But then again, who cares? So yeah, you could just keep going like that and who knows how many times it'll take and then you'll see a little bits and just click them off and continue until you've gone through all your sheets and you have your nice clean edge. But like I said, I like the kind of rough way that it looks. And So we're done to decide which side of the cover you like best or for the front. And it lays pretty flat. You might need to do some more training with it. But I have now some nice big spreads that are pre treated. And look, see, that's not perfectly even there. I don't care. I mean, you know, that you can even go through it like I'm doing now and train the pages. I actually do that with brand new sketch books that I buy like from mole skin or other. You'll notice that they're put together and the pages haven't been I'm calling it trained, but pre folding them so that when you go to use them, they lay nice and flat. There we go. That is the larger sketch book that's been treated. Fun, right? You can make up any size. You can make this could have been two size. But for travel, you can't you know, feel this because we're on video. But it's really lightweight. So enjoy 13. Wrap Up: Well, I really hope you enjoy making your sketch book. I know for me, it has motivated me to fill them up and, you know, like in this one, But this one, no. This one, just using this page to just test out new materials, you know, to not feel like I need to create a perfect painting or anything. And I wrote, you know, the materials down here. And so I think this one might end up being for that. Maybe I'll have this one B for, you know, new supplies and what they do and testing out their effects. And the fact that they're so easy to make an inexpensive and fun means that I don't feel like I don't know, that I don't want to use up the sketchbook for that, which is kind of silly anyway, but it can be if they're $28 and, you know, you might feel like you don't want to do that. Anyway, I hope this encourages you to create even more, and please join me in my other classes where we do all kind of fun stuff, florals, abstracts, and probably everything in between. Landscapes are coming, still life is coming, collage, stay tuned, see you next time.