I’m happy to announce that 5-Star books has made my book, Her Book of Shadows, part of its mystery catalog. This website features books that gain mostly 5-star reviews on Amazon and elsewhere so I’m pretty proud of this listing. Take a look, as they’ve got a lot of great fiction featured on their site.
Are you loyal to ANY store? I don’t mean that it’s the first place you go to buy something because they have a large selection. I mean, are you loyal enough to a store that you go out of your way to buy from them because you want them to grow and be successful?
I’ve watched as the retail industry has become more and more nonchalant about customer service. I’m regularly frustrated by stores with clerks who know nothing of the products they sell, online sellers who charge outrageous amounts for shipping and won’t answer emails. I had a local bookstore owner tell me he had to let one of his favorite (among customers) clerks go because ‘she spent too much time talking with customers.’
And that’s why I’m so loyal to Brian and Rachel Goulet of Goulet Pens. They’re SO different in this regard. I thought I’d tell you about an email dialog I just had with Brian as just one example of how different they are from the rest.
I wanted a bottle of Platinum Carbon Black ink. Goulet Pens indicates on their website that they are out of stock and so I wrote to Brian (who doesn’t know me at all) and asked, “Will you be getting any PCB in stock anytime soon?”
He wrote back, knowing it would not make him a sale because he had to say, “Our order has been back ordered for a loooonng time….” He went on to say “You should buy it wherever you can find it as PCB is in short supply right now.” I thanked him for his quick response, which had come within an hour or two of my email.
He wrote back later telling me that they had one “sample” left in stock. One of the great things GP does is make samples of all their inks available. Now you could interpret this as him taking an opportunity to sell me something. This sample sells for the vast sum of $1.75 and I’m sure most of that goes into the labor of creating the sample. No, he was just trying to be helpful.
But, that’s not all. Even later he wrote back to me and said, “I just got notice that our order has been back-ordered yet again. I thought you should know.” Again, no potential for a sale of any kind but he took the time to write and tell me that. Do you know any other business who would do this sort of thing? I sure don’t.
So, what did I do. I ordered that sample, and two pens. Thanks Brian and Rachel. You’re the best. Oh…before I go I should mention that all this occurred one day before Rachel gave birth to the cutest little girl you’d ever want to meet. Her name is Ellie. Visit her here.
People new to sketching very quickly run into the concept of point of view, and associated with it come discussions of perspective. Point of view is simply where your eyes are relative to the subject you’re drawing. If you’re looking up at your subject the horizon is below your subject. Looking down on the subject puts the horizon above the subject. And we’re told this is important because perspective lines converge to the horizon.
It’s about this time that we vow never to draw a building – the subjects used to teach us this stuff. We generally acknowledge that a band on a stage is above us, a truck in a quarry is below us, and when we draw them we draw them with different points of view without really thinking about it. The notion of horizon, though, is not part of the internal debate, at least in my case.
It should be, though. I’ve just learned that the old “eye-level line”, or horizon can still be mighty important and I thought I’d share with you my error and discovery. The results of being new at a skill is often not pretty, but it can be funny and even insightful.
I was wandering the Quebec City downtown area when I came across a guy leaning against a lamp post and playing saxophone. I’m still not much of a sketch artist but I decided to draw him. I dropped a buck in his sax case and started to draw. I drew the guy, the sax, and the lamp post. It takes me a long time to do such things, mostly because my eraser gets more work than my pencil and pen, and so at this point I packed up and walked home. That evening I realized my guy wasn’t standing on anything so I drew a couple lines to indicate the curbs along the sidewalk he was standing on. I put the sketch away.
A couple days later I was looking at the sketch and realized that something was wrong. Apparently, I’d managed to draw this guy while I was standing on a forty-foot ladder in the middle of the street. That wouldn’t have been a bad thing if I’d planned it, but I hadn’t. How did that happen and why didn’t it look that way as I was drawing it?
It turned out that the answer was contained in those two short lines I’d added on a whim. I scanned the sketch and erased them. Then I added some others. I kept playing with this until I got the point of view shuffled around to the way it was when I was drawing. Here’s the result.
I’m betting the sketch would become even more convincing if I’d add some color/shading on the wall on the opposite side of the street. Maybe I will. We artists have a lot of power.
As long as I’ve been a writer I’ve heard that writers are loners, that what we do requires solitude. And, for me, that’s true. I need to be alone to write effectively. I’m not even one who writes to music that so many seem to enjoy.
But I also remember the days when I was involved in the production of magazines. I remember wanting some quiet from the hustle and bustle of my editor demands so I could write. Mixed with it, though, were the “let’s get some coffee” parts of that business. Those of us in the throws of creating the monthly 128 pages that would hit newstands “real soon” interacted often, and the comraderie was as fulfilling as it was electric.
Those days, though, are behind me and I’m back to being alone as a writer, at least until NaNoWriMo came along. Last year I did it mostly in isolation. This year I was in the throes of doing the same thing when my NaNo regional ML suggested that I come to one of their evening coffee meetings.
I did. Then I went again. And again. Last week NaNoWriMo 2011 came to an end and we had a celebration dinner together. I had a bunch of new friends, all of them excited about writing. It was great… it was over. I was sad about that fact but then they said, “I hope we see you at our Thursday meetings.”
Huh? “Yeah, we meet most Thursday nights at the place where you first met us. You should come by.” It looks like I’ll have some people to talk to about writing afterall. Here’s a sketch I did of one of OUR meeting places.
You can always tell a newbie sketcher. We’re the ones playing 20 questions. What pencil do you use? What is the best brush for small watercolors? What’s a good starting palette for watercolors? Lucky for us, artists are a friendly bunch. They tolerate all these questions and patiently provide answers like “it depends,” which, of course, it does.
But no subject gets more discussion than do sketchbooks. Will it open flat? Will it handle washes? Is the paper smooth or rough? Will the binding hold up to being strapped to my boot? Ok…I made that last one up but it’s only a slight exaggeration.
As a newbie I’m overwhelmed by the sketchbook question. Initially I didn’t want one at all. I figured that drawing on single sheets of paper would be better because I could throw all my screw ups in the garbage. I still do that too much but several artists have said, “Hang on to your mistakes. You’ll enjoy looking back to see your improvement.” I’m still waiting for the improvement gene to kick in but their advice is sound.
So, I ran out and bought a small Moleskine sketchbook. I carry it everywhere. But it isn’t too friendly towards me slopping a watery sky wash on its pages so I bought a small Moleskine watercolor book. It’s great and has heavy, cold-press watercolor paper. You can do anything with it and while it’s pricey, I don’t see much point in skimping on artist materials.
Thus far, all my sketches have been very small. 3″ x 5″ is the largest I’ve done and most have been ATC size (2 1/2″ x 3.5″). But I decided that I wanted to draw a bit larger so the hunt was on again. The obvious choice would be the larger Moleskine watercolor book but the crazy landscape format really shows its downside when you flip open the big version and are faced with a 17″ wide book, with the part you’re working on representing half or less of the total weight of the book. And so my search continued.
To quote U-2, I think I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. I bought a Fabriano Venezia sketchbook and a Stillman & Birn Alpha series sketchbook. I thought I’d provide a few impressions of these two sketchbooks, sort of a newbie view. The summary first: both are fine sketchbooks for someone like me who likes to do ink/watercolor sketches.
| Name | Size | Pages | Paper Wt | Color |
| Stillman & Birn Alpha | 5.5″x8.5″ | 62 | 100lb – 150gsm | white |
| Fabriano Venezia | 6″x9″ | 48 | 90lb – 200gsm | cream |
Not much to say here. They’re basically the same size, the S&B slightly smaller as the dimensions in the table suggest. The pictures tell the tale. Surprisingly, this small difference ‘felt’ like it mattered to me as the S&B sketchbook just feels better in my hand. I thought this might be due to a weight difference so I weighed them. The S&B is lighter at 436 grams, compared to the FV at 455 grams but with only 19 grams difference (less than an ounce for you Imperialists) that seems unlikely. I guess it’s true; there’s no accounting for taste.
There are significantly more pages in the Fabriano sketchbook. Personal preference here but I prefer the thinner profile of the Stillman & Brin sketchbook so I’m willing to give up a few pages to get it.
Here’s where I grumble. I grumble about the US unwillingness to accept international standards. I grumble about paper graders and how these numbers become so muddled. I’ll stick to this second thing. How can art paper be heavier when using “lb” scaling and lighter when using “gsm” scaling? It either is or it isn’t heavier. Anyways, the Stillman & Birn Alpha paper is either heavier or lighter than the Fabriano sketchbook paper. If one puts a micrometer on the paper, the Fabriano paper is slightly thicker.
The Stillman & Birn Alpha paper is bright white, while the Fabriano Venezia paper is cream-colored. S&B do produce this same sketchbook with cream-colored paper. It’s call their Gamma series.
I don’t like the cover of the Fabriano Venezia. It’s high-quality and I like the cloth end plate. But the red blotchs… ugly. The cover of the S&B books are much nicer, though one could say less flashy.
Neither of these sketchbooks open as flat as a Moleskine but the S&B does pretty well. I think it would be difficult to draw across the gutter in the Fabriano book whereas it would much easier in the Stillman & Birn book
The Fabriano Venezia book comes with a bookmark ribbon, while the Stillman & Birn does not. I can’t be without one of these in my writing notebooks. I’m less certain about their necessity in a sketchbook.
It’s always hard to know what to say about pricing. It’s fine to cite retail price but the reality is that ‘street price’ is often quite different from retail price. What I can tell you is that I paid several dollars less for my Stillman & Birn Alpha than I did for my Fabriano Venezia. I don’t see price, however, to be a deciding parameter when buying a sketchbook except that I’ve learned that people with fountain pen fetishes like me shouldn’t buy cheap paper. In my opinion, nobody should.
I haven’t done a lot of sketching in either of these sketchbooks, though I have done one sketch in my Stillman & Birn book. What I did do was break the first page curse with some tests. It’s actually the second page, I guess but I wanted to save the first page for a table of contents once I fill the book.
I tried to keep my pencil stroke and pressure consistent across both notebooks but I’m not sure I was able to do so. It may be that the Fabriano book has a bit more tooth to it than the Stillman and Birn Alpha book. Both take pencil well and both are smooth enough not to bother any pointed instruments.
I chose a couple popular fountain pens (Lamy & Noodler’s Flex) and Noodler’s waterproof inks as those inks are what I use. In hindsight I should have included a washable ink but I didn’t think of it at the time.
I’ve been playing with Tombow pens. These are juicy water-soluble pens and I thought if anything would bleed through, these would. Both sketchbooks take the colors well and there was no bleed-through in either sketchbook. The same was true for the watercolor blotches, which I applied fairly wet as a heavy wash.
There is some shading with both sketchbook which might be a problem if you scan your drawings for posting in forums. I need to experiment with real sketches to see whether this is a real problem or not.
It’s probably premature to draw conclusions that will stick. Both of these sketchbooks perform well. They do what they were designed to do. But I did decide to use the Stillman & Brin Alpha while the Fabriano Venezia is sitting in a drawer. I just like the Stillman & Brin better. Here’s the first sketch I did in my new Sketchbook.