Because wirebound sketchbooks just don’t stack evenly.
I really hate wirebound sketchbooks. Maybe hate is too strong, but it’s still a heavy dislike. Yes, they stack like shit. You have to stack them spiral one way, then spiral the otherway, and so on. Ugh. When you work in them, you turn the page, and the perforated paper in the spiral gets all smashed up, then it’s no longer a flush surface. Fuck that. The process of page turning gets all up in my workflow.
And then pad style sketchbooks… three words: desk real estate. Takes it over. Property values go south.
But the biggest issue: cost.
Here’s a breakdown from dickblick.com of different sketchbooks at list price:
- $5.50 50 pgs. Aquabee Pen Sketcher’s Pad 8.5 x 11
- $6.65 24 pgs. Canson Classic Drawing Pad 9 x 12
- $11.20 100 pgs. Canson Heavyweight Sketch Pad 12 x 9
- $9.10 24 pgs. Strathmore 400 Series Drawing Pad 9 x 12
- $10.20 30 pgs. Strathmore Dry Media Pad 9.5 x 12
Figure about 15 cents per page. If you do a lot of drawing, that adds up. Especially if you compare it to cheap ass copy paper from Sam’s Club:
- $31.88 5000 pgs. Office Impressions Multipurpose Copy Paper
That comes out to about .6 cents per page. That’s less than a penny.
5000 pages at the art sketchbook rate of 15 cents a page equals $750.
$750 > $31.88
Now, sketchbooks have good quality paper, no doubt. I like the tooth you can get with different paper types. But if I am sketching out some ideas, why would I waste it on good quality paper? I tend to go through tens of poses and silhouettes before I settle on a good thumbnail. Then I sketch little studies of different parts of the composition and anatomy studies of the characters and so on. Considering paper quality doesn’t matter in these initial steps, why use the good stuff?
Copy paper, being less than a dime a dozen, is built for exactly this task. You can pour through fiscally responsible sheet after sheet. But that ain’t the only advantage!
The surface has almost no resistance to any medium. It’s real smooth, and if you’ve read my other blogs, you know how much I value the weightlessness of a medium in the visualization stages of arting. The crayola markers work awesome here. Your ideas glide out. Drawing with butter and all that.
Cheap copy paper is also suited to tracing. I don’t mean tracing from photos, but from your own sketches:
And of course, it stacks very well:
Maybe I just don’t like the name ’sketchbook’. They should be treated like artbooks. When you draw on that quality paper, you should be doing some quality ass artwork. But if you’re just sketching out your ideas, save the cash and buy the copy paper.
Similar Posts:
- Medium Review: Crayola Markers
- Exercise: Blind Contour Drawing
- My Secret Formula To Getting Good Quick
- Draw What You See First
- Artist: Rick Leonardi
