Building a Loose Leaf Sketchbook (for my camera bag)

Over the endless summer trips I managed to destroy several sketchbook (they started to fall apart etc) and  I had migrated to using A5 size book for sketching, but inevitably i ended up opening them out to do a broad landscape, so the landscape format gave me extra reach. However most decent sketch books , with decent paper, seemed to always be in portrait mode. The other observation was the spiral bound books (often cheap Chinese or mont marte, with very oridinary papers) seemed survive a lot better in rough handing, backpack and camera bag. The spiral binding made it difficult to do panoramic two page spreads.

I had figured out a fold-over loose leaf style would work. I found a couple of matte board off cuts and taped them together and scribe in two bends to male a spine. When folded they are close to A5 size. Then I found a couple of girls hair ties to hold the pages in (having more than one is handy to hold the pages down in the wind.

Next step was to prepare some paper and I wanted to be able to try out a variety of papers types always available, First I tore down a half set of fabriano watercolour paper (the other side was used but this was just for try out sketching). I also got a variety of other sketch paper, cold pressed and hot pressed and used A5 sheets along folding in half and tearing of cutting then into the narrow elongate halves that become A4 when folded over. Then just stack in the leaves, slide into the cover and pull the hair tie to the spine. the different types of paper tend to want to make the booklet spring open at the start to an additional hair tie around the outside is convenient.

The important part is this sketchbook fits very neatly into my camera bag.