I have been wanting to add color to some of my random daily sketches and saw that a lot of urban sketchers use watercolors. I busted out my old Windsor & Newton tiny set from college when I took Drawing I and my French professor insisted that we buy a good quality set. It immediately warped my current tiny sketchbook paper, it was wayyy too thin. I hated using watercolor paper though because it was always in a thick book and I felt weird using an entire 9"x12" sheet just to mess around. I looked up watercolor sketchbooks and though they were cool looking and had the sizes I wanted, they were all, like, over $50???

So I looked up some tutorials and found it was fairly easy and straightforward to bind your own books and make your own watercolor sketchbook.

The first one I made below was with synthetic black thread and I used three signatures of three folios. It was a combination of some techniques and stitches apparently.

I liked being able to mess around in the first one I made, especially because I realized there is very much a ‘smooth’ side and a ‘rough’ side to these sheets and the ‘rough’ one definitely holds water better.

The second one with the golden waxed linen thread was using a French link stitch and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I ended up using 6 signatures with a folio in each because these are thick papers and it seemed like it will fight me the least with laying flat this way. I’m excited to fill it up.