Had to miss Studio Friday for a couple of weeks, but I'm happy to be back with this week's theme - sharing our studio sketchbooks and/or notebooks. First off...I have tons of them both. I have a bad habit of being in Hobby Lobby or Office Depot and "forgetting" that I still have 99 blank pages left in a sketchbook with 100 pages at home. If I happen to see a new sketchbook and at that same moment have an idea for something to sketch, that baby is coming home with me. Consequently, I have stacks of sketchbooks with the first few pages colorfully filled in and the rest lonely from neglect. I'll have to work on that. I don't limit myself to just true sketchbooks either - any tablet of paper will do...spiral notebooks, graph paper pads, memo pads, composition books - all are fair game.

I have a thing for notebooks too. Actually, I have a thing for magazines which drove me to having a thing for notebooks. I used to have way too many magazines - stacks and stacks of them. Some years ago it became clear that I had to get rid them, but they were filled with such goodies - what to do? So I began tearing out appealing pictures from my magazines that I wanted to keep, and throwing the rest of the magazine guts away. I then began to purchase photo album notebooks with "magnetic" pages in which to keep the cool magazine pictures. At first I would just randomly trim and stick pictures on pages and fill up a notebook...but then I began to group the pictures by season, and then by color, so that each notebook went from winter through fall with all color coordinated pages. I have about 9 of these that I've worked on for several years. They still inspire me and the pictures often serve as models for when I need to draw a teacup just so or need to remember what a daisy's leaf looks like. I now have 4 huge folders filled with tearouts from magazines that are waiting to be artfully arranged in a notebook. One of my greatest luxuries and guiltiest pleasures is to sit and spend several hours processing a stack of pictures. I don't get to do it too often, but I thoroughly enjoy it when I do.