Have fun creating your own concertina sketchbook.Kevin Scully shows you how and suggests the many ways of using this novel format
As well as being great fun to create, the concept of a concertina sketchbook promises endless permutations that cannot be achieved with a standard one, which is limited to displaying at most just two pages at a time. It has the adv antage of allowing you to view as many or as few pages at one time as you wish.
As with any sketchbook, you can use it in any way that you want. It can be a place for experimentation, a travel journal, a personal diary, or a stand-alone piece of artwork. Each page can be unique, or sequential, or the whole image a continuous painting or drawing. You can introduce collage, use mixed media and add calligraphy. It is also the perfect place to practise new techniques where each page can document progress made from start to finish. It can be a wholly personal thing and simply a joy for you alone to use, or it can be a window into your working practice for anyone to see.
Although there are now quite a few readymade concertina sketchbooks available, making one for yourself could be part of an exciting project where the whole endeavour can be completely unique. If you feel that you don’t have the necessary skills to create one of your own, you could enrol onto a workshop where you will be shown the process, so you’ll be able to take one home that is ready to fill with whatever you want. You can also have something unique, professionally made to your own specifications.
Some available sketchbooks can seem rather daunting because of the vast area of blank paper that confronts you when you open it out, and as they are double sided there is even more space for you to contend with. One produced by Seawhite is A4 and contains 70 working surfaces of 80lb (140gsm) double thickness cartridge paper. That’s a lot of white space to fill!
Bespoke sketchbooks
Most concertina sketchbooks for sale by art materials’ suppliers and shops have the usual black, hardback covers, typical of most sketchbooks, so if you want something special you can either have one custom made in whatever colour you want, or you can make your own. The covers can either be of decorative paper, or they can be personalised by featuring pieces of your own artwork.
If you decide to make your own, first determine how many pages you want, and what weight and type of paper you require. This can be standard cartridge paper, watercolour paper, coloured paper, but perhaps not past
