The Sketchbooks

I stuck the tiny, rather sad-looking newspaper gondola inside the 'tragedy' mask this morning and added a bit of text (in Italian) to the piece, then left it all to dry.

I spent the rest of the day tidying up my sketchbooks, mending pages which had fallen out under the weight of all that creativity and making sure I had recorded all my ideas and research.
I find a sketchbook (mine are more like scrapbooks!) really invaluable in the creative process. It is like a portable brain where i can store anything I find, or think of, in relation to my project. I find I need a separate sketchbook for each project, otherwise my already scatterbrain gets quite a bit more muddled!

I'm going to share some of my ideas for making sketchbooks interesting and creatively pleasing. I enjoy preparing the sketchbook pages almost as much as the projects themselves.

1) Fold-out pages.
I'm infamous for my fold-out pages. I love to increase the visual area as much as possible and, coupled with my penchant for folding paper, I've created some interesting pages in my sketchbooks.
The simplest fold-out is a single fold. Take a piece of paper slightly smaller than your page and stuck one edge to the edge of your page. Instantly, both sides of the page are twice the size and you can fold it in when the book is stored.

The Bifold is an extension of this: Take a larger piece of paper and attach in the same way. Then fold out twice:

You can either fold it out concertina-style, or fold the edge in on itself.

I usually attach tabs to my fold-out pages. Anyone looking through the sketchbook can easily see that there is a fold-out and handle it with ease.

I also employ the same techniques if I have a picture or photo which is a bit too large for the page:

And sometimes i can create an optical illusion that way too!

Another fold-out is a multi-fold, where a longer and wider piece of paper is attached to a page. This then folds out in more than one direction. Oh, the fun that can be had with this!

Enough of fold-outs. You get the point. It's worth experimenting with.

2) Extra Pages

I sometime add pages, either by stitching or tying them in, or by taking the book apart and attaching a new page:

Extra pages can be added to the spine, or to the edge of a page, thereby creating a fold-out.

3) Decorated backgrounds

A decorated background can make a sketchbook page a lot more interesting. The only limit to this is creativity. I have used collage, paint, fabric, charcoal, pencil, photographs... etc, etc. Here are a few I made earlier:

There are numerous other things you can do with sketchbooks. They are perfect for exploring creative ideas, both in content and presentation.