Anyone Can Sketch - Part 1b

Personalizing Our Sketchbooks


Today's Trip:

• Making The Covers
• Decorating The Covers

Friday's trip: 

• What is Sketching?

Now that we have our sketchbooks we are ready to try and decorate them.  I tried very hard to pawn this off onto my two teenage daughters because they are both much more creative than I am but they left it up to their pragmatic father. Here are the steps for preparing the sketchbooks to be decorated.

1. Take a piece of rough sandpaper and scratch up the printed surface on the front cover. Sand it just enough to were is no longer has a slick waxy feel. This will provide a better surface for glueing cardboard to the front cover.
2. Cut a piece of card board the size of the front cover. The cardboard I used was brown on one side and white on the other. If your cover is going to be decorated with any kind of water media the surface needs to have some weight to it. If it is just going to be colored or glued to white card stock should due.
3. I then spread a thin coat of elmers glue on the brown side of the cardboard and glued it to the front cover. This leaves the white side for the children to decorate in just about any fashion they desire. Make sure and sit some books on top of the sketchbooks until the glue has set. (30 min)

Finished Cardboard Cover

As I have eluded to earlier, crafty things are not my strong suit but I had to come up with some way for my 6 and 7 year olds to personalize there sketchbooks without it taking an entire day. Here is what I came up with.

Step one was to take masking tape and construct very simple block letters on the front of the book. If you are skilled with an utility knife you could go a step further and round out all the rough edges.

I then set them up with some VERY cheap water color paints with a jar of water between their two stations. The only rule I gave them was that they had to cover all the area's between the tape so that the letters would show up well.

They jumped into this with enthusiasm and we quickly found out that the cheap water colors were cheap for a reason....the brushes were awful. We plan on using these when we go out sketching so I'm going to have to get them some decent brushes. Despite the sorry brushes they both did a great job. Our biggest hangup was removing the tape. I did not wait until the cardboard was dry and as a result the tape pulled up some of the top layer of the cardboard. I'm not sure if waiting for it to dry would have helped much but we made due.  Here are the results.

The letters were still a little abstract for my taste, so I added a little outline to define them better - and Karis added some stickers.

The final step to our decorating was to covers them up with clear packing tape...... I know you crafters out there are probably going crazy with all the better ways this could have been done but we went with what we had.  

The most interesting part of this process was that as I helped Cole and Karis put there sketchbooks together my teenagers were plotting to figure out how they could make theirs look better. Here is what they came up with.

Nothing like a little competition to stir the creative juices.

Now I have taken a lot of time showing what we did with the sketchbooks but I can't emphasize enough how much this part of the process helped the kids to get excited about sketching.  I spent the next several days holding the little ones at bay because they were ready to use their new sketchbooks (I actually had to stop Karis from filling up the whole thing in one afternoon).

On July 22nd  I will do a post on just what sketching is and how it is that anyone with normal abilities can learn to sketch and then on Monday July 25th we will take a look at how my kids did with their first sketch lesson.