Thank you Blurb Books for sponsoring this post!
It's no secret that I love sketchbooks. A lot. And as someone who's been keeping a regular sketchbook since high school, I have stacks of the things around. A few months back, I decided to put together a book of my sketchbooks, to have handy in one volume a smattering of all those drawings. So when Blurb recently offered me a chance to create my own book through them, I immediately jumped at the opportunity to make the sketchbook idea a reality. If you're not familiar with Blurb, they're a terrific company that allows you to create and print your own books, magazines and eBooks (as well as sell the end result in the Blurb Marketplace, Ingram, or on Amazon).
Sketches and Sundries is the book I made with Blurb, a hardcover volume full of sketchbook images from the past few years. I'm over the moon with the way the book turned out — Blurb's quality is top notch. The Premium photo paper I used for the interior pages is the stuff of dreams (speaking of which, the paper swatch kit is a big help in figuring out paper stock). And the colors! I'm blown away by the vibrancy of the images and my artwork reproduced beautifully.
To design the book, I used the Adobe InDesign plug-in available from Blurb. I've never worked with a plug-in before, but it turned out to be straightforward and well worth the time. The plug-in integrated with InDesign to set up my document to spec, so there was no guesswork on my settings or about output for print. If you've got a basic, working knowledge of InDesign, you should be good to go using the Blurb InDesign plug-in (and if you need some extra help, I'd recommend the help page and video tutorial). But if InDesign isn't your cup of tea, Blurb does offer BookWright, its own layout tool that's free and easy.
And I'll have Sketchbooks and Sundries available for sale soon! So stay tuned on that...
I had a terrific time making this book with Blurb. Having the opportunity to go through my old sketchbooks gave me the chance to think about the illustrations I've made and the things I'd still like to draw. Invariably, there have been plenty of ideas I'd forgotten about in those sketchbook pages that I'm ready to bring to fruition. And among those ideas would definitely be more books like this. I've been mulling over the idea of making a book of portraits or even a one-off magazine. I’m excited by all the possibilities and plan on diving back into those sketchbook pages, to see what future projects are waiting inside.