I’ve written before about French fashionista Ines de la Fressange and her love of notebooks. Now she’s selling notebooks of her own design:
You can see additional designs at her online shop: Ines de la Fressange
Ines de la Fressange Notebooks
Thomas Lawrason Riggs’s Notebook
Father Thomas Lawrason Riggs was the first Catholic chaplain at Yale. He was a member of Yale’s class of 1910, where he met Cole Porter, the composer. He later attended graduate school at Harvard, where he roomed with Porter and Dean Acheson, a future secretary of state.
During World War I, Riggs returned to Yale to serve as a translator for the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. After the war, he became a Catholic priest, and after a visit to the universities at Cambridge and Oxford to consult with their chaplains, he became the chaplain at Yale. He later donated his papers to the university and this notebook is part of the collection:
Items of note include his typed manuscript of Saving Angel and a notebook from 1917 that contains notes from his training for the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. The notebook is blank in the middle and its back portion contains notes in pencil dated July 18-21. These notes instruct on how to identify contagious diseases, bandage various sprains, set broken bones, and prepare meals for the injured (poached eggs and cocoa are two items on the menu). There is also a particularly sobering section that describes the different sorts of poisonous gas a soldier could inhale, how to identify them, and which ones would prove fatal.
Read more at A Tale of Two Archives: Tracing the Life of Thomas Lawrason Riggs ’10
See other World War I notebooks.
Sara Boccaccini Meadows’ Sketchbooks
I love the luscious colors and texture of these sketchbook pages!
New York-based print designer and illustrator Sara Boccaccini Meadows has made it a habit to take her sketchbook everywhere she goes, taking inspiration from her everyday surroundings….
This artist also has a 35-minute online class to help you paint beautiful botanicals.
Read more: Artist Shares Her Colorful Sketchbooks She Fills w/ Beautiful Botanicals
August F. Foerste’s Field Notebook
A gorgeous example of a natural historian’s field notes. This belonged to August F. Foerste, an American geologist and paleontologist.
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/229964
https://biodiversitylibrary.org/item/229964
From the original article at the Field Book Project website:
Field notes are well known to be essential, primary material that provide details about collections and expeditions that aren’t found in published material or specimen labels. Field notes can also contain diary entries, poems, and sketches which give insight into the lives of the researchers themselves. In our last post, we briefly highlighted some of the candy and drink preferences of some of the researchers in our collections.
One of these researchers is August F. Foerste. In his Specimen notebook, Ohio, 1887-1888, with no explanation, we find a list of several different candy recipes, including chocolate creams, lemon drops, and Neapolitan creams. Brings up quite a few questions. Who gave him the recipes? Was this the only paper he had available to write them down? Did he try to make them? …
What we can determine is that they were written down in 1888 when Foerste was completing his master’s degree at Harvard University.
Read more at: Field Book Project
Collection highlights, news, interviews, and other treasures uncovered by the Field Book Project. The Field Book Project is an initiative to increase accessibility to field book content that documents natural history. Through ongoing partnerships within and beyond the Smithsonian Institution, the Project is making field books easier to find and available in a digital format for current research, as well as inspiring new ways of utilizing these rich information resources.
Sketching Sculpture
…or perhaps this post’s title should be “Sketching Skulpture,” because my inspiration comes from a blog post at Sketchbook Skool.
The sketch below by Jonathan Twingley really caught my eye– such a cool mix of color, texture and light and dark shading with fine cross-hatching. It was done on location at MoMA, as part of a project of sketching all the Picasso sculptures on exhibit there.
Sketching on location is a great way to bring fresh inspiration to your sketchbook. And doing it with a friend is a great way to keep from chickening out. It can be a little intimidating to sketch in public—particularly when you’re sketching something by a great master. Don’t go for a perfect rendering; that’s what cameras are for. When you sketch what you see, sketch it as you see it. Art is about interpretation. Is the art you’re sketching a perfect rendering of a person, a house, a field? No, it’s the artist’s emotion and perception on the page.
For some reason, I have almost always avoided sketching sculptures. If you’re sketching a realistic sculpture of a human figure, the problem is that it usually looks like you tried to draw a real human model and ended up with a stiff and lifeless representation, no matter how accurately you captured the pose and proportions. But seeing the sketches above has inspired me to try drawing some abstract sculptures the next time I have a chance. That way I can focus more on shapes and shadows and texture, and less on trying to draw an accurate figure.
I’m always looking for inspiration for my own drawings— lately I’ve been drawing from photos but I think sketching objects or people in three-dimensional real life is better practice. I just started a new sketchbook, so now I can’t wait for my next chance to see some sculpture!
Read more: Field Trip Sketching at the Museum with Danny and Twingley | Sketchbook Skool Blog
André Mare’s Sketchbooks
I don’t remember where I first came across the work of André Mare. He was a French artist who was associated with the Cubism and Art Deco movements, and his World War I sketchbooks are quite remarkable.
No discussion about Cubism can be complete without at least some mention of André Mare. Yet even in conversations amongst experts on the topic, it is rare that the name of this accomplished French artist and designer is brought up. Perhaps this is because Mare was admittedly not a pioneer of the Cubist method in the way that Picasso or Braque were. Nor was he necessarily a virtuoso of it, as were his friends and sometime collaborators Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger. Nor was Mare a top Cubist theorist, as were Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger—the authors of Du Cubisme, the Cubist manifesto. What then was the contribution Mare made to Cubist history? He was the first to apply Cubist theories to the art of war. The art of camouflage may date back to the earliest days of human civilization, but the first time it was ever officially and systematically used during wartime was in World War I. As a French army soldier, Mare was one of the first people drafted into a camouflage unit. He applied his talents broadly and successfully, leading his team in the development of a number of innovative techniques. He designed realistic looking fake trees, hollow on the inside so soldiers could climb up inside of them and use them as lookouts; he painted tanks, artillery, and the outside of tents to render them invisible from the air; and he designed and built false targets. We know about all of his ideas today because the whole time he was fighting, Mare kept a detailed diary of his experiences. Its pages show detailed, color drawings explaining how he used Cubist techniques to reduce objects in space to shapes, colors and planes in order to fool the eyes of German pilots. Just as with a Cubist painting, which strives to capture four-dimensional reality, Mare created trompe l’oeil worlds on the battlefield that captured a multitude of different perspectives all at once, so that even whilst moving, viewers could not be sure exactly what was passing before their eyes.
Read more at: IdeelArt: Andr̩ Mare РCamouflaging the War
New A5 Notebook from Pebble Stationery
I recently reviewed the excellent pocket notebook from Pebble Stationery. Now they are back with a new Kickstarter project for a larger A5 size notebook, in the same design with Tomoe River paper, which I’m sure will be a popular item!
The campaign runs for just 2 weeks, from June 25th to July 9th. Deliveries of notebooks are expected to be completed in August. They have limited the number of notebooks available to make sure there are no issues getting enough paper, so if you are interested, make sure you get your order in ASAP. Retail pricing on the notebooks will be $12.99 USD.
Pebble Stationery shared an early prototype of the new A5 notebook with me. I was pleased to see that they kept all the great design details of the pocket notebooks– same cover, endpapers, stitching and paper. And they have added numbering to the pages. The page count is 120, up from the 80 pages in the pocket notebook.
As with their prior notebook project, for each notebook sold, Pebble Stationery makes a donation of a pencil for a school child. This time, the beneficiary will be an orphanage called the Ibn Hayan Association, in Fez, Morocco.
You can see the full details on the Pebble Stationery A5 Notebook Kickstarter campaign here.
Seafarers’ Sketchbooks
This book looks really cool: The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks
From the description:
In this remarkable gathering of private journals, log books, letters and diaries, we follow the voyages of intrepid sailors, from the frozen polar wastes to South Seas paradise islands, as they set down their immediate impressions of all they saw. They capture their experiences while at sea, giving us a precious view of the oceans and the creatures that live in them as they were when they were scarcely known and right up to the present day. In a series of biographical portraits, we meet officers and ordinary sailors, cooks and whalers, surgeons and artists, explorers and adventurers. A handful of contemporary mariners provide their thoughts on how art remains integral to their voyaging lives.
Often still bearing the traces of their nautical past, the intriguing and enchanting sketches and drawings in this book brilliantly capture the spirit of the oceans and the magic of the sea.
The same author also did another book on my wishlist: Explorers’ Sketchbooks:
Notebook Addict of the Week: Katerina
This week’s addict is Katerina Sakkas, an artist and writer from Sydney, Australia. She’s been using Daler Rowney sketchbooks for 20 years, filling them with drawings and ideas:
Simple and sturdy with their canvas-textured hard covers and heavy-weight, off-white paper, Daler Rowney’s Ebony journals have served me faithfully for 20 years, as a place to document the process of art-making; to research, experiment and workshop ideas.
Sometimes messy, sometimes elaborate, they hold an eclectic mixture of different media and textures, combining practice drawings and paintings, image designs, reference pics and (more recently) mock-ups of comics.
You can see more of her sketchbooks/journals in this post from her website, where she also shares images of her incredible paintings. There is lots more to see on her Instagram feed too (@kat_sakkas), where she posted this photo of more journals:
In addition to Daler Rowney, her collection includes Paperblanks, Leuchtturm, Rhodia, Clairefontaine and Moleskine notebooks.
Thanks for sharing your addiction, Katerina! It is always great to hear from fellow notebook addicts!
Notebook Review: The Kokuyo Sketch Book
The Kokuyo Sketch Book is a Japanese classic with a cult following. In Japan, this style of notebook is known as Sokuryo Yacho:
Sokuryo Yacho = surveying field book, Literally Means A “Surveying Field Notebook.”
It’S Often Simply Called “Yacho” By Our Loyal Users.
You could compare it to the government issue Memorandum notebooks used by the US military, or engineering field books– the Kokuyo Sketch Book and similar Level Book and Transit Book versions were originally issued by the Japanese government to employees working on civil engineering projects. They were first made in 1959, and the company celebrated the 60th anniversary this year with limited editions:
Like Field Notes, the various limited edition and branded partnership designs of Kokuyo Sketch Books have become very collectible. People customize them with decorations, add elastic closures, and put them in protective covers. Here are a few of the many variations I’ve spotted on Instagram:
If you want to see more, search the tag #野帳 for “field notes,” and #測é‡é‡Žå¸³ for “survey note book”
Back to the notebook itself in its basic form, the Kokuyo Sketch Book is 3.75 x 6.5″, and about a quarter inch thick. This makes it a great size for a jacket pocket, if not for the back pocket of jeans. The slimness of it is very appealing. The green cover has a slight fabric-like texture, and the gold stamped “Sketch Book” title gives it a very retro look. It is a hard cover– not as thick a cardboard as a Moleskine cover, but it still doesn’t have much flex to it, and seems quite sturdy. You can bend it back on itself without the spine breaking. The corners are sharply squared off, with a fair amount of cover overhang. Those who are longtime followers of this site know I’m always griping about wide cover overhang on notebooks, (purely for my own aesthetic preferences and unrelated to function) but I’ve realized that my objection to it really depends on the proportions of the notebook– the thinner the notebook, the less it bothers me, and on this notebook the overhang doesn’t bother me at all.
The Kokuyo Sketch Book not only opens flat, but it will lie flat by itself. Inside the notebook, the endpapers are plain white other than a barcode inside the back cover. Then you have 80 pages of squared paper. The light blue grid lines are spaced at 3mm, which is noticeably smaller than you’ll find in most notebooks, which are 5mm. The only other notebook I can think of with an even tinier grid is the Kleid 2face Notebook, also from Japan.
The paper weight is not specified but it feels smooth and relatively light. Some wetter pens bleed through quite a bit, and show-through is about average. I would call this notebook semi-fountain pen friendly. There was almost no feathering, but there were small spots of bleeding with most fountain pens, more noticeably with wetter pens. If you use finer nibs and drier inks, you will probably be fine.
I bought this notebook for $5.00 at Yoseka Stationery in Queens, NYC. I haven’t seen them for sale in too many other places, but I believe Goods for the Study carries them. I thought I had seen them at Kinokuniya a while ago, but they haven’t had them the last few times I’ve visited. Online, you can get a 10-pack on Amazon for only $19.99. The Level Book is available as a single copy, only $4.82 with free shipping. JetPens doesn’t carry them, strangely. At Baum-Kuchen and Nomado Store, you can get a snazzy Superior Labour-branded version.
I really love the Kokuro Sketch Book– the classic styling and the practical durability make it a winner. And the slim 80 page format makes you want to line 100 of them up on a shelf. But I am trying to figure out how I’d use it. My only problem with it is the size– I like it, but I am so wedded to my favorite 3.5 x 5.5″ size, it’s hard to use anything else in my daily carry. If Kokuyo made a smaller 3.5 x 5.5 ” version of the sokuryo yacho, I would find it irresistible!