Decision Made: I’m Making My Own Sketchbooks the Easy Way
I still have 3-4 unopened watercolor sketchbooks with quality paper (cold press - i.e., textured - 140lb/300 g/m²) plus the Moleskine Art Watercolour Journal I’m currently using. However, as I indicated in yesterday’s post, I have been considering not purchasing any more commercial watercolor sketchbooks and making my own. Well today I got confirmation of something that clinches the deal. In that blog post I described how I can get sixteen 7 1/2” x 5” (19x13cm) sheets (32 “pages”) from one 22” x 30” (56x76cm) Fabriano Artistico 100% cold press cotton rag paper rated at 140lb/300 g/m². I cut out sixteen such sheets from a sheet of Fabriano Studio paper (student grade, but still quite nice), made back and front covers using medium weight chipboard covered with decorative paper, and took them to our local UPS Store and had plastic spiral binding applied. The cost? $3.15.
That binding was that inexpensive made me decide to give making my own quality sketchbooks a shot. I have three more sheets of the Fabriano Studio paper so I can make additional books before having to order new paper. When I do a cost analysis comparing homemade to the 36-sheet (72 pages) Moleskine Art Journal and the 10-sheet (20 pages) Strathmore Journal, my homemade 16-sheet sketchbook costs 53¢ per page. The Moleskine costs 44¢ per page and the Strathmore costs $1.44 per page. The paper used in the Strathmore Journal is the exact paper I plan to use in my homemade sketchbooks so that’s a fairer comparison and shows almost a 60% savings. If I used two 22” x 30” sheets to make a 32-sheet sketchbook, the per page cost drops to 42¢ per page! Another consideration, though, that isn’t accounted for in pure numbers comparisons is wastage. In the homemade sketchbooks I will use the whole 7” x 5” drawing area, whereas I’m usually wasting an inch and a half or more in the commercial alternatives.
Now I get it that sketchbooks with spiral bindings (plastic or wire) aren’t for everyone. They’re especially not for sketchers who like to do 2-page spreads. So far I’ve never done a 2-page spread and I’m not inclined to do so in the future. I may change my mind and if I do, I’ll put my DIY sketchbooks together the way I’ve done before, i.e., by stitching signatures together to bind the book. Eliminating the cost of spiral binding reduces the per page cost for a 16-sheet sketchbook by 16¢! For my style of sketching, however, the spiral binding is a welcome time saver!
There are many YouTube videos on binding your own journals including using the spiral binding method so I won’t bore you with a step-by-step description. However, I am including a gallery below that shows you highlights of some of the steps I went through to make my test book.
