Early Summer and Portugal Sketchbooks Bound

My early summer sketchbook

The smoky skies have been keeping me indoors with the windows and doors tightly closed. I don’t like it at all, especially in August, but being shut in has enabled me to get several things done that I haven’t otherwise made time for. At the top of my list was binding my Portugal sketchbook and the last sketchbook before that.

My early summer sketchbook (above) includes our trip to Yosemite in May, so the front cover shows my sketch of upper and lower Yosemite Falls. On the back is the sketch of our house, which I had made just before we left for Portugal.

 

My Portugal sketchbook

As is my tradition for all my travel sketchbooks, the covers of my Portugal sketchbook are collages of maps, postcards and other ephemera. I bound the symposium program right into the sketchbook: I just removed the staples and drilled the program pages and related planning papers using the same hole template that I use for all my signatures. In the center of that signature I included my “certificate of participation” from the symposium (yes, I spotted the typo 😕). I filled blank spaces with cards that I had swapped with new people I met in Porto.

 

The symposium program is bound right into the sketchbook.

I taped in the cards I collected from sketchers I met in Porto.

I "graduated" from another symposium!

Before I started sketching, I used to save ephemera from trips by shoving it all into a bag or box and then forgetting about it. Now I find a place in my sketchbook for any scraps of paper I really want to save, and the rest get recycled. I like the tidiness of everything in one bound book, and it cuts down on clutter that I never look at. My travel sketchbooks, on the other hand, are so much fun to look back through, again and again.