Comfortable Shoes Studio

Review: Canson XL Recycled Drawing Pad

Basics:

• 9x12 inches, 60 Warm White sheets to a Coil bound pad
• $8.99 at AC Moore
• 70ld/114gsm
• Perfed pages
• Acid free blah blah blah

It seems Canson has a “true to size” sheet thing on almost all of it’s pads now. So if it’s marked 9x12 inches on the cover the sheet you tear off is actually 9x12 inches. This is a really really great thing. I always have hated that many pads would lose a ½ to full inch to the perf. I really like that.


The paper responds well to ink, nibs are true to size and there is no spread or feathering nor soak through on these pages. The paper is not glassy smooth but has enough tooth to accept pencil and charcoal well. It accepted watercolor well, but did show some cockling that did not even out completely when dry. Though it did flatten quite a lot, so that it’s just slightly wavy.


I really enjoyed how this paper accepted ink and watercolor. The watercolors really look great on it’s warm white color and ink melds with the paper in such a way to just look like it’s been there awhile.
 
I’ve been testing several new pens on it and I really  like that the nibs stay true to size and don’t spread all over the place when testing them. Even when my Noodler’s flex pens were flexed to their widest and bleeding ink onto the pages, there was no soak through or bleed through. I can’t stress that enough. It was pretty amazing to find an easily available pad that accepts ink as well as this and for a relatively inexpensive price compared to other fountain pen friendly paper.

 

Awesome Day

Occasionally my DayJob is beyond awesome. Yesterday I got to meet the guys behind FireSeedArt.com, see the tail end of them hanging a show, and then my coworker asked me for some interview questions. We all know how much I like to pester artists with questions. (Wait until you see my interview with Ted Micu in the first issues of Put it on Paper!) I got my coworker to agree that I could cross post the blog, with a link, to my blog here. So you guys are in for a treat, an improtu interview with a really inspiring artist. Plus some great pictures.

Here are a few teaser pics:

 

Spring Fever

Spring. I love it. The weather gets warmer, the grass gets green, everything goes into blossom and then I can’t breath. I’m always torn between going outside and soaking up the sun or staying inside so I don’t have to take all kinds of medications to just breath. Sometimes I just go outside anyway and then feel the pain for days afterward. Pain radiating out from my sinuses, my eyes watering and my throat feeling like it’s going to close off from all the post nasal drip, nauseated from the dripping and then being unable to sleep from the pills, or alternatively being unable to stay awake or drive from the other pills. Worse yet, I can’t think straight, I can’t focus on anything for more than 5 minutes thanks to the medications.


It’s not surprising that my head gets kind of messed up in the spring. Love it or loathe it, I end up on an emotional rollercoaster where I’m trying to stay awake and work on my goals and then there are days when my goals seem so unattainable that I feel like giving up on everything. I think, “Why bother? I don’t have the energy to work on anything anyway. It can never happen because I don’t have the energy and thus don’t have the time.” I stop working on the stuff that matters the most to me, the blog, my classes and art.


I go to work. I come home. I try and sleep. Or I sleep all the time.


Attempting to make time to walk or eat right go out the window. I fall into bad habits and start to feel worse. I start to think, “Why bother?”

It’s that one thing that is the pin to all of this. Without the allergies I wouldn’t feel like this, so terrible.


And then things ease up, all the trees aren’t in blossom, the allergy medications start to work better as I’m not fighting off the pollen from everything. My breathing is more even and not raspy in my throat. My face doesn’t feel like someone tapped me with a baseball bat. Finally I can think again.

Review: Canson Classic Cream Drawing Paper

Basics at a glance:

• 9x12 inches
• 24 ivory colored sheets to a coil boundpad
• $7.50 at AC Moore
• 90lb/147gsm
• Acid free blah blah blah

The paper is a warm ivory color and the texture is smooth to the touch with a little visual texture. Pens offer some feedback on the surface and work well. Most ink does not soak through and most lines do not spread, staying true to the nib width. The paper is stiff and heavy, and at 90lb/ 147gsm it is a stiff paper.Light and medium heavy watercolor washes did well without soaking through the page. The paper did cockle while wet.

The paper would make a great art journal due to the lack of show through. Another thing I really like is that the sheets are truly 9x12 inches as the perf is at the 12 inch mark unlike other pads which have the perf at 11.5 inches with the last half inch including the coil binding. Some of the inks I tested on the pad feathered, but most did well. Watercolor performed well and looked good on the page. I’m going to have to test this pad out a little more before I decide if it’s a buy or not. At $7.50 for 24 sheets it’s a tad on the pricey side for general sketch paper and I’m not sure it’s a splurge or not.

 

Next week I'll review another Canson pad, the XL Recycled drawing pad.

How Creativity Works

 

Another Midori Traveller Notebook Knock Off Idea

I wanted to add 2 more journals to my MTNKO. I saw a blog post somewhere, I cna't remember the blog that added a additional pockets to the notebook through the use of a rubber band. I decided to use that idea to add 2 more notebooks. I wanted to have my general idea notebook, a notebook for PioP and another sketchbook. To do this hack you'll need the following:

A medium length thin rubber band or a loop of the elastic you used to make you MTNKO

2 Notebooks

Slide the rubber band through the center of one notebook then the other,so they are attached spine to spine. Slide one notebook under the notebook already in your MTNKO.

Here's a helpful video of the process.

 

 

Latest Challenge

The latest Challenge is up on AJ Ning. Head on over and check it out. Lot's of messy fun!

State of the Weekend: An Everything Journal

I was given another glimpse into just how powerful art journaling can be last night. I had an idea for Put it on Paper, something that I had rolled around in my brain once before and pushed off as not possible and not a very good idea at the time, but I’d made note of it in my art journals, made some doodles and wrote it down.

I quickly flipped through the last 2 journals where I knew the info to be, tabbed those pages with a little Post it flag, and then used my iPoo Touch to snap some pics, shelved the books and took the info with me, in my pocket. I sketched out a quick idea in my art journal of what I thought this idea could look like and emailed it to Jane. As I relaxed into bed, I reviewed the pages on my iPoo and made some fresh notes and doodles about the content of the proposal.

How amazing is it that I can carry 4 journal’s worth of info in my pocket? I read somewhere that someone scanned their notebook pages into their computer and used a specific program to make them searchable. How cool is that?

If you have an art only journal consider carrying an everything art journal with you everywhere, it will prove itself to be indispensible in short order. (Check out a variety of pockete sized notebooks for this, or make your own pockeet noteboook using my tutorial here.)

Make it Yourself: Midori Traveler Notebook Knock Off

Make your own version of the Midori Traveler Notebook Knock Off.

Materials you'll need:

• Round Elastic Cord
• 6x9 inch sheet of leather
• Lighter
• Hammer
• 3/32in hole punch
• Ruler
• Pencil
• Exacto Knife

 

I'm not overly happy with the quality of this video. I'm still working out which video settings to use for upload to youtube.

Fisher SpacePen Red Ink Years Later

The Space Pen is a standby pen for me. I love its compact shape that extends to a full sized pen when used. Similar in size to the old school joy that is a Parker Jotter its just comfortable to use. I’ve got 2, a brushed chrome version and a stealthy matte black, the chrome with black ink and the black with red. My go to ballpoint pens when a ball point must be used.

I used them religiously for my GTD system back in the day. Black was for regular entries- to do stuff things that needed managing. I had a lot to manage 6 years ago, as the manager and buyer for a busy floral department. My GTD system is well documented here. It was a simply take off of PigPog’s system of a simple line on the outer side of a moleskine Volant or cahier, blank pages please. I’d enter a date and action item, then as it was finished cross it off the list. Items that were desperately urgent were marked or boxed with red ink.

And this is where things get interesting. I was going through a notebook and I noticed that the red ink had ghosted through the page and in some cases ghosted onto the facing page. in some cases this is no problem, I doodle, a lot and obviously ghosting of doodles wasn’t much of an issue, BUT when I had take notes in the red ink, it made the next page of notes hard to read.


I noticed this about a year after I had initially taken the notes. It hasn’t gotten any worse over the years but it is interesting. It occurred on ALL the papers I’ve taken notes with- old issue Moleskine Volants (w/ the GOOD paper), Wausau Ivory paper 24lb, Staples/ hammermill ivory 24lb, and various other papers. It also only occurred with the red SpacePen ink, not the black or blue.

Odd stuff.