Bicyclopolis: Beginning 2013 With New Strathmore Toned Tan Art Journals

For as long as I remember, I've drawn pictures. Some time in the last century I sketched in crappy spiral bound notebooks with felt tip pens and ball point pens - I really didn't care about the quality of the materials or whether the paper would turn yellow and disintegrate in five years.

In 1999, the folks who put together the Minnesota Journal 2000 Project particularly Roz Stendahl took me aside and told me to shape up. Since 2000, I've been using commercial, bound journals with good quality paper for my annual journals and my larger journals.

For several years, I used Cachet Earthbound Recycled sketch books because I liked to sketch with a mid-toned paper. I switched to Strathmore hardbound sketchbooks a few years later for some reason I can't remember and a few years after that switched back to the Cachet books. The Cachet journals got really beat-up by June and I would have to glue them together using paper from brown supermarket bags - real jankety-looking.

This year I'm switching to the Strathmore Toned Tan Art Journal for my annual 5.5 X 8.5 inch journal and my 8.5 X 11 "Big Journal". The paper is a nice mid-tone brown, a bit cooler & grayer than the Cachet paper. The paper is really good for dry media like colored pencils and pastel. I'm using an assortment of pens, Prismacolor pencils and Koh-I-Noor Gioconda pastel pencils and Faber Castell Pitt monochrome pencils and some other stuff (I get my stuff at Wet Paint in St. Paul).

Here's some examples from the big journal and the first page of my 2013 journal. We have a great view of the iconic, red neon First Bank Building sign from our loft in the Union Depot (see "Union Depot renovation: ‘There are so many parts that are absolutely gorgeous"as told to Minnpost's Joe Kimball). I think I'll make it an annual tradition to start off my annual journals with a sketch of the First Bank Building.

Click on the pics to make them bigger: