Sketchbooks

I have a lot of sketchbooks. Dozens. Mostly only partly filled. I always have these lofty ideas for creating beautiful works of art with them (or even just keeping up with them and filling them), and then the reality of a sketchbook kicks in -- most of the stuff is garbage. But I have a thing for the actual sketchbook itself -- I just love them and keep buying them.

So I was motivated to do this post from two different sources. First, my friend John lamented on the same sketchbooks-full-of-crap problem but decided to post a some stuff anyway. John and I have tried the cartoon-a-day sketchbook format a few times with varying sucess (I'm about 30 cartoons behind on my current one, but I WILL catch up). Anyway, he posted some stuff last week. Or maybe earlier, and then some more recently. Anyway, take a look. The second motivation came from a site I stumbled upon -- a collection of images from Moleskins. I'd link to it, but now the link is dead and I am sad. Lots of these collections out there, and I've seen work like this many times, butthis was areally good collection (basically just flikr sites with "moleskin and art" as tags). But for some reason I started thinking that I could take all my partially filled-in sketchbooks, put them in order, and just finish each one. It'd be a weird mismach of what I working on a year ago, 5 years ago, etc. and right now and into the future.

I'll get to that soon. I am busy this month writing a middle-grade adventure novel about a boy who lives on a huge submarine and takes care of alpacas but gets shot out the garbage tube and lost in the ocean and then found and then must find his way back to his sub but there are baddie-types that want to find his sub also. Hijinks ensue (zoinks! jinkies!).

So for now, three scans from a Moleskin watercolor 3'x5.5' book. It's got 11 pages drawn on, three pages ripped out, and 16 blank pages left.