Portland, OR March 2025

For creatives of all types, sketchbooks provide practice for quickly expressing your ideas and exploring and recording your creative journey.  Keeping a sketchbook helps you to build the habit of putting pen to paper. Think of the act of recording ideas in your sketchbook as planting creative seeds!

We’ll start our day making our own unique decorated cover papers for our book.
In the afternoon we’ll make our accordion (concertina) folded books. This Concertina fold allows the sketchbook to be extended into a single sheet of paper almost 4 feet long. This flexible and extremely versatile format allows for personal modification of substrate size from using 4” x 6” individual sheets to working across multiple folds for panoramas and/or landscapes. With 12 continuous sheets (24 sides), these unique sketchbooks will be made from Strathmore 400 Series Watercolor Paper with a cold press watercolor surface. This paper is acid free. We will make hard covers for our sketchbook using our own decorated covers. A ribbon closure will complete our book.

Materials Fee $25 paid at the beginning of class includes:

• 2 sheets book board 6 ¼” x 4 ¼” grain long
• Watercolor Pad Strathmore 6” x 18.5” (12 sheets) 140lb-300gr
• Collage packets
• Mechanical Pencil
• All-purpose glue
• Shared acrylic paints
• Ribbon for our book closure

Supplies Needed  to bring for Class:

• 9” x 12” Mixed Media Paper from sketch book (for our covers)
• About 4 sponge brushes 1-1.5” in size
• Bone Folder
• Utility knife or box cutting knife for cutting cover pages
• Metal Ruler 18”
• Cutting mat at least 12” in one direction

**Students of every experience level are welcome!