Lately, rather than buying sketchbooks, I’ve just been making them out of trash. This was inspired partly by an old video I watched of Trent Holbrook making his own sketchbooks. I have some of the same problems with “real” sketchbooks as Trent mentions in that video:

• I worry about ruining a too-nice sketchbook with bad drawings.
• I tend not to finish sketchbooks due to distraction, or losing track of them, or wanting a new book, or whatever.
• I shy away from using them for the rough planning, note-taking, list-making, and other nitty-gritty parts of the art process for fear of sullying the beautiful art book aesthetic.

So I end up with all these dumb, constipated, half-finished, store-bought sketchbooks. And worse, it’s a deterrent to drawing. Making sketchbooks out of trash solves this.

All I’m doing here is cutting some scratch paper (in this case separator papers that were inserted into a job by a copy shop) down to 5″ x 7″, slapping them between any nearby packaging cardboard cut down to the same size, and putting two staples in the spine. I cut off the page corners for some crude rounding. That’s it.

I have no anxiety about cutting loose on these trash sketchbooks with dashed-off, ill-conceived, messy drawing, which, for me, is my favorite drawing. I also have no problem using them to jot down a shopping list of art supplies or keep score in a Magic: the Gathering game. I can jam them into any pocket and abuse them as I see fit. They were TRASH.

Some artists fill their sketchbooks with page after page of beautiful drawing and it’s inspiring to see. But for me, a sketchbook functions best as a place to barf out unformed ideas. I’m down here in the dumpster, and loving it.