A good piece of advice I have learned in my forty..... something* years is this: Just because something is popular does not mean it is good.
Behold, because curiosity got the better of me, that Viral Sketchbook from TikTok:
Hoo boy. Where to start.
Well, the cover's pretty sturdy. It has a nice soft fake-suede feel to it. The binding is *pretty* good, and it is indeed a lot of pages for the price.
Except those pages are practically tissue paper.
I'm serious, they are unreasonably thin and wimpy. Wimpy in that this paper couldn't make a cut in an overripe tomato. Thin in that I dot an I while writing in the poor thing and can see the imprint three pages later. I use my trusty ballpoint pen, but the most appropriate media for this book is None. A cheap Crayola marker left uncapped in a junk draw for thirty years and in it's dying breath of ink could bleed through the pages. Fresh markers are obviously a no-go and you can forget about watercolors. Pencils are fine if they are very soft, and not sharp.
So in other words, maybe this is a good Sketchbook for somebody out there but not me; none of my preferred drawing techniques work here. Unfortunately, OCD is a hell of a thing and so I have a sickness that makes me never abandon a Sketchbook in progress. I'm sticking with the Viral Sketchbook even though it's a struggle. Note that while scanning this Sketchbook (also a real pain because of how big it is), I have a sheet of white card paper between the pages because otherwise you'd see drawings from the next three pages. Argh.
Well, anyway, here's "Nature: The Burren, Ireland's Kingdom of Stone", or my sketches of same:
Next time - more sketches from "Nature" episodes, probably!
* - Well, it's like this. I turned 42, which should've been a huge deal, the very week the United States started taking Covid-19 semi-seriously and went into lockdown. So... yeah. It's not just me, turns out other Mid-March birthday-havers who remember that experience seem to all be sharing a weird feeling of "what is time, even". Also I am astoundingly bad at math. So I don't really know how old I am. Wait a moment... Oh, hey, I'm not fifty yet! Cool!
