Pilgrim Stories

It’s around this time every year when I hunt around my studio for art supplies I haven’t used in a while or have never tried. It probably has something to do with change of seasons. I dug up this sketchbook —given to me as a gift last year and never used — made by Ex Libris Anonymous in Portland, Oregon. It’s kind of a cool idea for a book. The company slices and dices old novels (cover and selected pages) and spiral binds them with sketchbook paper. The end result is part novel/part sketchbook, although you wouldn’t want to read a novel with this many pages missing. The acid-free sketch paper is great for pencil drawing but it would probably buckle if you added a wash to it. And as you might have guessed from the title of my post, my novel is Pilgrim Stories, adapted from Margaret Pumphrey’s Pilgrim Stories. If you want to have a look at the books, here’s a link. And the pencil? It’s a water-soluble Cretacolor pencil from the Urban Sketchers goodie bag at the Symposium in Singapore, although I didn’t add any water to the drawing.