Book surgery and non-linear progress

Hello hello,

How are you friend? It's been a while.

I've been on the hunt for the perfect sketchbook, and I suspect I'm not the only one. The trouble is "perfect" is a moving target when you're still learning and experimenting. My latest is one I bound myself, which has cheap watercolour paper bought from the local shops. It only has 20 pages and doesn't have a cover, but it's light and cute and means I get to that finished sketchbook feeling faster. There's something satisfying about being able to fill a need by just making the damn thing yourself, even if it's a little rougher than something store-bought.

In another act of book surgery, I spliced a thick Stillman & Birn Beta sketchbook into two much thinner ones that fit more nicely into my notebook system. Hacking up a (very expensive) sketchbook felt very wrong, but the pages haven't fallen out and it's now much more usable. I'm still deciding whether binding my own sketchbooks or bisecting store-bought ones is the best approach for me, probably a mixture of both depending on what I'm doing.

Lately I've been getting more into watercolour, working a bit more traditionally and learning to not rely on having ink line art so much. I go to sleep with my head full of colour mixes on paintbrushes and lovely paint names like “Opera Pink”. Progress is not linear but it is there, slowly reaching more confident brush strokes, stronger values, and leaning more into the unique nature of watercolor. I’m trying to not think about where I'm going with this, if anywhere at all, and just enjoy the journey.

Some other things I’ve enjoyed lately:

• This analysis of D’Angelo’s song “Really Love”, which breaks the beautiful song down beautifully. That wandering baseline now lives in my head.
• Newsletters from Henrik Karlsson, a Swedish writer that I stumbled across somehow - it might have been from this essay on shortcuts and longcuts.
• Beeper app, which brings together all the various messaging platforms my family and friends use so I don’t have to remember where I should look for them.
• My public library - I’ve barely purchased any of the books I’ve read over the past few years, since the library almost always has a copy of what I’m looking for. The trick is to be patient and not be too fussed about the format. A recent fave was the short utopian book “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers.
• I’ve dipped my toes into front-end development at work and for UXCamp Boorloo, and whilst I’m enjoying the challenge it’s been nice to have experienced developers to troubleshoot Git and teach me things about modern tech stacks.

I'm trying to lean more towards human recommendations rather than algorithmic ones these days - let me know if you have any articles, books, music or movies to recommend!

Teresa

P.S. You might also be interested in what I’m up to Now.