One for Nate

After returning from Mexico City I had quite a bit of correspondence to catch up on, including some comments in queue awaiting approval. I was pleasantly surprised to receive comments from my son Nate, the genius who gifted me my website/blog as a birthday present ten years ago. One of the comments he left stated that he’d love to see the sketchbooks that I had been working on while in Mexico…

The first sketchbook I’m sharing is one that I  made by hand using Japanese handmade paper to cover the book and then I filled it with watercolour paper. This book was designated for my trip to the pyramids and for studies of pre-columbian artifacts.

One of the unusual features of this sketchbook is the concertina effect I used on the pages. Although I wanted a fairly compact and portable book, I also wanted the opportunity to draw larger or wider sketches, and by folding the pages in this manner I had the best of both worlds. Another unique quality of this book is the staining treatment of the pages, which was done by creating mud using the earth at the base of the Temple of the Sun and rubbing it into the watercolour paper.

The second sketchbook I made was specifically for my trip to Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s house in Coyoacan. The book was made entirely with handmade paper that has a soft fabric-like quality, allowing me the possibility of stitching into it as well as drawing. I also included a variety of weights of paper to experiment on and the cover was made with a special piece of hand dyed paper, to which I attached some bright yellow rick-rack trim.

This sketchbook is by far the more personal and emotional one, containing oil pastel rubbings from the blue wall surrounding her house, blossoms that had fallen from the trees in the inner courtyard, my entrance ticket to the museum, and sketches of her personal jewellry and one of her paint-stained hospital smocks. Somewhere on my camera is a photo of me sketching in this book while sitting in the courtyard gardens of Casa Azul – one of my lifetime dreams come true!

The third and final sketchbook that I worked in for this project was not handmade like the others, but I did decorate the cover of a purchased mixed media sketchbook to personalize it a bit. This was the book that I began as a warm-up exercise before leaving for Mexico, and also carried it around with me through airports and on bus tours.

So there you are, Nate, a post just for you all about my recent sketchbooks. I just hope the rest of my readers aren’t too put off with this little peek into the inner workings of my crazy mind.

Until next time,

always carol xox