Proko - Are you TOO Perfect with your Sketchbooks?

Are you TOO Perfect with your Sketchbooks?

Watching Stan and Sinix on mic talk about "CalArts sketchbook perfection" and how we may have one book for testing or one for studies had me pondering how others consider this topic too... hmm... Is that Yensid's Ghost knockin? CalArts? Call it a ball park. HOMERUN! Call me gym rat. Mickey, jockin! ahaha _______________________________________ I've worked in digital raw animation (no ounce of traditional art) and also in Booksales at both Barnes and Noble College and the normal brick and mortar stores. I was fighting against the digital erasure of paper when I got bored of talking wine with millionaires and so I started walking down the annals of story; such resplendent glories I was allowed to stack and sell. BUT WHO CARES! ahaha Title is nothing. "Master"? Call me L'Amateur (Lover). A care bear~ lol In Shipping & Receiving we throw books around like nothin. Bricks of words and pictures. My belief is that the more I learn of printing processes, canvas stretching, gesso primers (Tempura eggies lol) etc... the more I am a scientist of all media. Once I finished learning programming I'll have come full circle. Don't be scared to see how data-structures affect your art philosophies ya'll. A Producer does not belong in a "title" but makes anything. Production does not stop. Do not limit your freedom with perfectionism in a sketchbook. Frank Herbert advises heavily against it if you wanna start riding Sand Worms ahahah Call that a Paradigm! ( Or was it pair of dimes? Anyway I've said my two cents.) (Btw are you ready for the Euclideon UE5 wave? Better get a surf board! Call me a GameShark. We're about to start putting places the size of planets inside of planets. How could I ever be afraid of an imperfect line touching my book? What a hindering panic! ahahah) __________________________________________ I recommend Side-Saddle and Coptic Stitch for text-blocks. Those two methods once learned will give you the skill to pop out a moleskine (depending on the paper quality) within the blink of an eye. (5-40 minutes) Here are some fun ones I made to be experiences to see, hold, and draw in. Mizu Blue Book Necro-Manga-con Milk Dud Cappuccino Hand-Dipped ...and some hard cover book I slapped together with 28lb paper (the BEST cost value copy paper you can possibly find in my experience here in the U.S. Watson-Guptill enjoys a similar grain in their series that used to appear in B&N.) Hilarious how Ernest Watson reached out to me and I never even heard of his school til 24. Butterfly Effect. ahahah But I definitely don't mind drawing whatever the heck I want in these things. They are not special just because I have turned them into decorated UI experiences. If I wanted to publish anything I'd just compile it and re-print. That's called SECOND EDITION! ahahaha The more light hearted I am with anything, the easier it is to move weight! I pump mountains on the daily! You can too! BE-LIEVE in yourself~ <3 Wabi-sabi; Kintsugi flow~ Cheers! <3

Serena Marenco

3yr

I was a perfectionist (sick) when I was a student and my teachers did everything they could to correct that! From the life drawing teacher who after 100 minutes, would dismantle my compositions, setting up a new one for me (my classmates thought she was bullying me, I thank her instead), to the fresco teacher who would occasionally stop behind me and yell "STOP IT, IT'S FINISHED!!!" Unfortunately, their efforts were not enough and for many years I continued to add details with the triple 0 brush, the micromine or the infamous 1 pixel digital brush. In the end I finally accepted that perfection is impossible, microscopic details do not come out in print and that the observer does not need to see every leaf to perceive the entirety of a tree. (And that very often people are more impressed by a sketch done in 30 minutes than by a week's work XD ) My sketchbooks are now piles of papers piled up in a bookcase, from which I remove only the best bits which I keep in a folder. I'm very envious of people who manage to have nice sketchbooks to show off, but... no, maybe one day I'll layout the best things in a nice file for printing. It's not like I did professional layout for 7 years for nothing! :p

Charline B.R.

3yr

... *literally using post-it as sketchbook and throw them inbetween 2 pages of some other book*... I think I know the feeling... At least with the perfectionist mindset you developed a lot of tenacity and patience, which are two difficult skills to gather. Bit the 80-20 rule was really liberating for me :p

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Yiming Wu

3yr

Damn you make so fancy looking sketchbooks! I believe those are watercolour paper? They look pretty thick to me. I make my own drawing books as well, but from thinner paper, ranging from 80 to 120 gsm, white or semi-white paper, and I'm quite used to those thickness. I tried watercolour paper once and it seems to get thinner lines and I can put down more details with my ink, but somehow I'm afraid it could break my nib so I seldom use those. I also do my gouache paintings on those paper, because I don't quite need the paper's texture. Here are some of mine: I mostly make A4 ones, they are typically 120-160 sheets, and A5 ones I made from scrap paper to do sketches some times. I also have A3 ones they are thinner so it's less heavy.