How to Start?

Hey, my name's Shlee. This will be the start of my very first blog and I am very excited. :D I have been mulling the idea for a sketchbook blog for years, but I never had the resources (laptop) or the sketchbook that I felt I wanted to share. My boss's wife, Martha, teaches a bookbinding course at the University of Delaware and she found time recently to show me how to make my own sketchbook (something I've dreamed of since high school). I just finished 2 small, 5.5x7x1.5, hardcover sketchbooks yesterday and 4 larger, 9x12, softcover sketchbooks earlier this week. I want to start with my small spineless sketchbook (Martha showed me how to make both and I'll give you more of a rundown of the structure in later posts).

Origins of the idea: I rigorously keep a sketchbook with me at all times and try to draw in it as much as possible, but most of the time it's not as much as I would like. Again, I've always wanted to have a sketchbook that I created; something that I could say: "I made this - this is totally mine." I got the opportunity to do that recently, so one goal has been reached, but I have also wanted a means to share my sketchbooks with more people. Blogging was the original idea, but I never got a chance to start one. This semester I purchased a laptop, so the dream became more of a possibility.
I would also like to give credit to a fellow blogger who I graduated from high school with, Hubris/Cal. He is a musician and is weekly posting a cover of a song he has recorded - this inspired me to share my art via a blog as well.
Goal of the blog: I want to post pages from my sketchbook whenever I finish 2 pages. This will be fairly regular (I never know when I'm going to finish 2 pages), but I'm hoping that I can keep up with how often that occurs. (I have a tendency of procrastinating and I'm hoping that this will help me become more active in my art-life.)

Why "Irving Stone Press"?: On the way home from Martha's after we finished my first 2 hardbound sketchbooks, she told me that when an artist creates their first books, they come up with a "press-name" (like a graffiti artist so that people may recognize their work). I wanted to find a press-name that sounded cool, but I wanted it to be purely accidental. I had a little gluing left to do on my one book (hadn't put in the end-sheets yet), so I grabbed 2 large books from my house, glued the end-sheets, placed my sketchbook between the two I had found and sat on the stack (so that I didn't need to find a huge stack of heavy books to keep the cover from bending). Once that was done, I went to put back the books; one was a broken Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and the other was The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. [A little more background on me: I am a sophomore at Penn State, University Park and going to end my years here as an art major. I like to work in all kinds of media, which has made finding a single medium to focus on hard for me, but recently I became interested in becoming a BFA (Bachelors in Fine Arts) major in Printmaking. I enjoy the process I have to go through in order to print and that I can also print as many of my prints as many times as I wish, which is another reason why I enjoyed making my own sketchbooks (lots of process). Right now I am taking a course in lithography and enjoying it very much.] "Irving Stone" reminded me of my developing passion for printmaking (lithography especially because there is a stone involved in printing), and I felt that the name was appropriate to be my press-name. I know nothing about the author and have never read his books - just liked the name. :) I am working on a simple logo idea that I can eventually stamp to the back of all of my books - I will let you know when that happens.

So, that's my intro and later today I will post pictures of my 2 sketchbooks with an emphasis on the spineless one. I will also be teaching you some terms of bookbinding as I show you more.

- Shlee