the bad sketchbook

a few weeks ago, i went to a birthday and there was a game of kahoot and my teammate won for us, and i -- undeserving -- got half of the prize. a truly horrible notebook (and some stickers):

the bad sketchbook

and it's not bad because of its design necessarily (though i wouldn't say it falls into the realm of my tastes), it truly just has very bad quality. the paper is so thin you can see through it, the binding is already giving up, pages falling out, every page has these greenish clouds printed smack in the middle of them. it's just altogether not a good product. but i love it. not for what it is but for what it does.

what it does is relieve me of any and all inhibitions about using it.

i have this thing with sketchbooks (something that might sound familiar to any artists) where the nicer the paper and the more expensive the sketchbook, the less i want to (or allow myself) to use it. i just don't want to waste it, you know? which is why i have long stopped using artists' sketchbooks and instead been using these (relatively) cheap composition-type notebooks that just have this copy-paper like paper. this has been working great for me. it takes pretty much all mediums i use surprisingly well, but it also doesn't need to work perfectly for everything because it is, after all, still just a sketchbook. it doesn't need to look good.

these guys.

anyway. i haven't been using my regular A4 sketchbook. because i think another thing that intimidates me, besides the paper quality, is the size. A4 is such a big space to fill. i remember fondly my spell last year when i filled an A6 notebook with one drawing after another over the span of two weeks. i feel safer in smaller formats. they don't expect as much from you. you can make one drawing and the page is full, which is a nice feeling.

so i haven't really been drawing in my sketchbook. or at all. and i've been painfully aware of this. and i saw a tumblr post a while back about how compulsory phone use and doom scrolling can also just be your body wanting you to do something with you hands and i thought argh i need to get into doodling. use doodling to occupy my hands whenever they compulsively reach for the phone. cue the bad sketchbook. it's bad. it's tiny. it cost me nothing. i have nothing to lose if i make a bad drawing in it. so, one fateful afternoon, watching an episode of the dan and phil podcast, i did.

i like it when dan gently touches his mic. dunno what it is

the pen i use is not made for paper so it bleeds right through the pages. i kind of like this though. adds to the rough, throwaway character of the sketchbook. keeps me humble.

i've been reworking my conni & co billi fancomic because as i had planned it, there were some conflicts with the conni canon and other general storytelling issues and it was just lying around bringing me no joy. now, with a new angle on it, i'm having so much fun again. there is a new character that's all mine and it's fun trying to gauge how he fits into the universe and how the canon's characters would react to him. naturally, i've been drawing lots for this.

i really really love this drawing on the right of billi sitting in agony.

featuring some bad tigers

drawing instead of scrolling my phone while waiting for my pancakes to bake! this is the whole point!

for the initial version of the billi comic i was reinterpreting the characters already. because even though there are drawings of them on the books (the originals, illustrated by Dorothea Tust, not the atrocious new editions), that i guess i'd consider canon, i never wanted to completely appropriate Dorothea's work by just copying her designs. but this new version of the comic is set a bit later, analog to the Conni15 series, where we don't have "canon" designs for the characters anymore, so it's been really fun figuring out what everyone might look like, taking into consideration their personalities and 2017 teen fashion.

another hard launch intermission

every trans coming of age (well. gender) story needs a bad haircutting experience. and the subsequent decision to just do it yourself. but it took me a couple tries to figure out what haircut billi would realistically be subjected to by the nice hairdresser.

riso can be anagrammed into soir because you end up working deep into the evening when you try to print something.

yesterday, me and some classmates spent a long day at uni to riso print our comics. there was a fourth page of drawings but i gave that away.

this is the bad sketchbook thus far. it seems to be becoming a february trend for me to get a small sketchbook and draw into it very freely to combat some sort of art block. i really need to keep going beyond this one though. oh, but the paper is so stupid, it's just so disarming. i don't know if i'll be able to feel the same kind of free with other sketchbooks. but we will see. i will try.

for now, i will go back to my stupid pink unicorn notebook. you should too.