How to make a watercolour sketchbook - easy concertina or accordion

there's something rather wonderful about making your own sketchbook not only can you control the size of it you can control the sort of paper you put in you can mix it up and there's the pure joy of creating something absolutely unique that's in fact as unique as your art so i'm going to show you over the course of the next few films four different sketchbooks that can be made very easily with some paper some glue scissors a sharp knife we're not going to use needles and thread and those sort of book binding specialist equipment these are books for artists so they're quick to do fun and can be as beautiful or as plain as you want let me show you this is called a perfect band sketchbook and that's nice because it opens flat so nice for working in this is a concertina sketchbook which is lots of fun i've got two concertina sketchbooks i'm going to show you one has special pockets in it's made out of one sheet of paper and that's not stuck together this is made out of strips of paper that are stuck together with tabs of course you can put in an optional pocket whatever you want so i'm going to show you two different ways of making that accordion sketchbook and then i'm going to also show you one using binders but you can just use ordinary wire and that's lovely because you can use it over and over again you can take pages out really easily you can mix it up and that's a really easy nice book to make so my name is liz chatterton i'm a professional artist based in berkshire and every week i bring you a tip or trick that i wish someone had told me about ages ago and this week it's all about how to make your own sketchbook just before we start making the concertina sketchbook i want to tell you why i think it's such a lovely sketchbook to work with i've got a couple of examples of commercial ones here and these are from a company called sea white this is a little tiny one and you can see why it's called a constantine sketchbook or an accordion sketchbook just got a plain hard cover and this is actually made out of cartridge paper and if i can show you it's actually double folded can you see that so i'm not sure what the weight is but it's actually double folded so it's quite a sturdy little book and you can just imagine that fitting in your pocket and that comes with a little slip case which is lovely this is a bigger version and so the reason i love constantine sketchbooks is that you can tell a story and they're great for display as well so for example we were on holiday in sydney and we were staying in the basement flat of this wonderful georgian terrace um it was called yes fort field terrace and the i don't know the czar sister used to stay there 100 years ago not in our house that we were staying in good old airbnb anyway i thought while we were there wouldn't it be lovely to actually draw the whole terrace so i started with ours and my plan was to do uh one each day we were only there for four or five days and i actually only managed three but my plan was that it would go on and on and tell the story of that terrace and the other thing is it's really flexible so this is also sigma at the same time and down on the beach so you can draw on one page two pages three pages whatever you want to do that helps you tell your story so very flexible and great for a time period and this was actually the first one i ever made um and i used it to tell the story of a day i was in umbria in a beautiful place called orvieto and i decided to tell the story of my day i spent my entire day sketching and i sketched lots of just little ones they were all sort of half hour sketches i guess in in this particular day some of the streets um my view while i was having my lunch very tasty if i remember the main market square by by the big cathedral just a beautiful archway i saw and this was actually the view back where we were staying which was outside all vietto so in that concertina sketchbook i had the story of my day what we need let me tell you first of all we need the paper to go inside that seems obvious uh it could be cartridge paper watercolor paper you could do it with pastel paper whatever surface you're going to be working on and then you also need a hard cover and again we'll talk about options for that in a moment you need a decent size working space because we're going to be using a big piece of paper and cutting it so it's easier if you can spread yourself out you need to protect the surface you need to potentially need a cutting mat if you've got one and then tools wise a ruler pencil something to cut with so either a sharp knife scissors or even this is a slitting knife this is a proper bookmaker slitting knife but you don't need one of those for folding this is what book binders use it's called a bone folder but you could just use the handle of a knife or indeed the handle of your scissors i'll show you that we need some glue because even though it's folded we've got to stick the covers on something to put the glue on with um a bit of newspaper to stop the glue going everywhere and then this is actually the inside of a cereal packet really useful because it's non-stick and it'll stop all the the gluey paper sticking to itself while it's drying that's about it so i think we should probably get on right i'm going to use cartridge paper in my folded sketchbook so i have an a1 sheet of cartridge paper here i'm not sure what weight it is and i've just checked the package and it doesn't actually say which isn't overly helpful but for the pen and wash i would guess this is a couple of hundred grams per square meter so that'll be fine you could of course use watercolor paper or whatever you want and we need to decide how big we want our book to be this was made by cutting a sheet this size into three strips so i think that's good size and i'll do that again so we need to cut this paper say into three strips and i'm measuring it it is 59 and a half centimeters so let's have a think 19 and three quarters that's our measurement and i am going to bring this straight edge up to those two marks and fold it over now the more accurate you are with your folding the knee to the end point you can see this fold here we need to make it sharper now a book binder would use this bone folder and run it along that edge to make a really nice sharp fold you've probably not got one of those so you just use anything that won't mark you could use the end of a knife like that or let's find a pair of scissors even the handle of the scissors is enough just to make a really sharp fold i'm going to turn that round open it out and then bring the other edge onto that fold again being as accurate as possible and then fold that in and just as before make sure that edge nice and sharp and you can see i've folded my paper into three strips if you wanted to do a smaller book you could fold it into four strips which would be a lot easier fold it in half half again you could do it into as many strips as you want you now need to divide it into three i'm going to use this knife just to slit you could of course use your scissors you could just rip it if you like a ripped edge if you were doing this with made watercolor paper a deckled edge might be lovely i did that too quickly so i've made a bit of a mess there and i'll need to sort that out so here are our three identical pieces of paper but what we need to do is stick them all together to make one long long strip and the way we do that is by making just a little tab at the end of each one so i'm going to use this ruler it that's possibly a little bit wide but it's quite convenient and i'm just marking it with that point because that makes it very easy to fold over so that's one tab sorted let's just show that it's easy to do with something else so i've got my scissors just do the same i could just use the back of the scissors run it along like that fold it over use the handle of the scissors to make that nice sharp fold there and then use my bluntish knife so it's just an old kitchen knife like that just run along fold it and then use the handle of that knife and then i've got three tabs and all i do is place one strip inside the other glue it do exactly the same at the end of this one glue it and then i will need to cut off the final tab because otherwise the last sheet will be a little bit longer than everything else the easiest glue for this is actually to use a glue stick of course you could use pva glue but it's just a bit more convenient and again it's all about trying to line things up as accurately as possible right let's cut off that final tab obviously you could use two sheets of paper and have six long strips together and make a really huge concertina book you can go on as long as you want so here's my super long strip and we now need to fold it i'm going to fold each one of these into six so that i will have 18 sections so i carefully line up the first piece of paper in half that is really easy and you'll know the routine by now really smooth down that edge each half is 40 and a half centimeters so i'm going to divide that by 3 which is 13 and a half i'm going to bring [Music] that edge over and i've got my first fold i can then bring this folded edge to the center and i've got my second fold and again just smoothing everything down and you can see how that has started to form the concertina more accurate you are with your folds the better the final book don't worry about which way it's folding at the moment because you can easily turn it round where's the end of the paper i'm going to fold that paper in half that while i'm there i might as well fold that one in half let's carry on just making sure that fold is as sharp as possible makes it a bit more manageable once you get it down to this size when you've got all your folds done you'll you'll have a strip something like this now you want the tabs to be invisible so that is the back of your book can you see that tab you don't want showing so that's the back of your book i managed to put a fold in totally the wrong place so do concentrate it's very easy to get confused and i was trying to do it for the camera got myself confused and i've got a dodgy fold so i'm just folding it backwards and forwards backwards and forwards so that i've got my book block if any of the folds are not as sharp as they should be just go over them at this point so let's put our book block to one side for the time being think about our cover so on this example can you see that the cover is slightly larger all the way around than the papers and the purpose of that is to protect the paper traditionally book binders use this it's called gray board because it's bored and it's grey very imaginative you could use that but you could take the back off you know if you've got an old sketchbook that you've pretty much used you could just use the back of an old sketchbook that would be fine the quickest cover this is an old bit of mount board so you can often get these off cuts from framers they've cut the mount out so they're happy to see the back of these middle bits and that makes an instant cover which is great if you use grey board you might want to cover it in a decorative cover this is a commercial sketchbook from artway and it's actually got a little hardboard cover which i really like so if you've got any very thin cardboard or mdf you could cut that if you want to i think we'll go for the easiest first and that is just to use a piece of mountboard so you need to measure your your page and you can see i haven't folded this perfectly but it's good enough each page is 13 and a half centimeters by 19 and a half therefore i'm going to add about a centimeter on each side so i've measured my two blocks out some all covers out just double check because measure it twice cut it once is is not a bad maxim and when you are cutting if you've got a sharp knife like this break off a segment so that you're cutting with the sharpest bit of the blade as possible don't expect it to go through in one cut just do multiple cuts and that will be more accurate so now is construction time you've got your front cover and then we're checking our block to make sure that the hinges are at the back they're not showing because we don't want that yep that all looks good and then we've got our back cover and all we need to do is put glue here stick that on glue there stick that on and we're done but we could do something a little more exciting and i thought it might be quite nice to have an enclosure something to keep it closed so i wondered about putting a ribbon before i stick because then i can tie it and it'll keep the whole book closed so that's an optional extra i can decorate the cover and i've got some paper i could just cut a strip and put it on and decorate it that's entirely optional but let me show you what to do to stop us getting paper accidentally on the rest of the book just put a bit of newspaper inside the front cover i'm going to put glue onto the first page because if i glued here i would probably glue around the edges and that bit isn't doesn't need to be glued because the cover is bigger if we remember than the paper be generous with your glue but not silly then take out that gluey bit of paper and get rid of it got my cover and then i can center just just by eye onto oops onto that cover and can you just see that it it's got a little overlap all the way around so we can press that down and that's our front cover then we're going to do exactly the same on the back so we just pop that in there to protect put on as much glue as we think we'll be needing spread it out if i am going to put my ribbon on which i think i will i'm going to fold it in half i want the shiny side outwards i'm just going to pop that there and i'll need a bit more glue on top of it then i'm getting rid of my paper and i'm again by eye going to get that there and ideally you want the covers to line up but because my block is a little bit out of kilter i'm not sure how well those are going to line up a little bit of time to move this around try not to fiddle too much there we go and you see once that's dry that can come over the front we now need to put that under a heavy weight to dry probably for a couple of hours this is where those bits of cereal packet come in because i don't want any surplus glue sticking all the pages together so let's put that there and that'll just stop any glue going where it shouldn't so you might be wondering how to use the gray board and look i've used that back of the old sketch pad i showed you earlier so it definitely needs covering because i've doodled all over it cut your cover to the size you need it remember putting that little bit of extra on and then select whatever paper you want now this is scrapbooking paper so it's quite nice and firm you'll find if it's too thin it'll go wrinkly once the uh the glue's on it what i've done is drawn around the cover put a little bit extra at the side what's that two three centimeters two and a half centimeters and then i've mitered the corners but not right up to the edges i want a little bit because i want all that board covered so what i could do if i wanted to to make the folding a little bit easier i could use just school round on the paper i say that's optional but it can make folding just a little bit easier if you want to i'm now going to glue right up to the edges and say if your paper's a little oops we need to keep that steady because what i don't want to do is get glue on the front of this paper carefully picking that up and getting a clean sheet popping it down and then placing my board in in place now starting with a short end i'm going to fold that over and then with my thumbnail i'm just going to nip that in at the edge there do exactly the same at the bottom fold it over nip it in and nip it in there i then can come round to the long edge and fold that over and you can see that the corners are all nice and neat and covered no none of that ugly old gray board is showing just do the same and there i've got one cover obviously if there's a particular pattern make sure you center it i didn't need to with that and there are my set of covers so that's really easy what we now need to do is find more of that clear non-stick cereal packet cover them weight them down and let them dry really thoroughly so that they don't warp and then you would use them in exactly the same way and because you're sticking here you won't see any of that at all i thought you'd like to see the finished book now it's dried so let's open it up you can see i just stuck a strip of decorate decorated paper on the front you could print this you could paint it you can leave it plain do what you like you're an artist you make it your mind up and there we have our accordion sketchbook i say i just like putting the ribbon on because it stops it opening up you could use an old shoe lace you could use a bit of raffia anything just that sort of decorative like that but if you don't want to go to the hassle of doing that just get a large rubber band and that'll keep it all together

Channel: Liz Chaderton

Views: 2,995

Keywords: book binding, bookbinding, bookbinding for beginners, bookbinding for artists, bookbinding studio, accordion sketchbook, concertina sketchbook, diy sketchbook, watercolour sketchbook, watercolor sketchbook, make your own sketchbook, how to make your own sketchbook no sewing, how to make your own sketchbook easy, make your own book, making a sketchbook from scratch, making a sketchbook cover, bone folder, zigzag book how to make, accordian

Id: DOZsPbNhpbY

Length: 26min 5sec (1565 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 09 2022