Will the paper hold? 🇺🇸

I’m working my way through my most recent Moleskine wishing I had a notebook with better paper. The charming thin yellowish paper of the classic notebook isn’t the best choice for most pens, inks, watercolors or any any water-based material. Also, it’s too thin for constant erasing, and I can erase the same image several times if I’m chasing a very particular pose or composition.

In short, this sketchbook is book for sketching, fast and loose, but not much else.

Many breakfasts go by and I feel like drawing something half-figurative, half abstract, but I end up changing my mind about what to draw, or I give up altogether just because I know the paper won’t take it. If I happen to have my coloring pencils close by, then my desires can be explored, but most of the time I just look for a BIC pen and hope to capture some gestual residue.

Every corner of my house smells of paint, so I went to the beach to focus on work. I needed to dive (in the work and on the ocean). I finished a variant cover this weekend at the beach. My brother is working on another cover as well. After that, we’ll both focus on pages for the rest of the month. Pages to draw, pages to write. The story that happens in the pages is often different from the one happening in the covers (even when they’re from the same book) and in sequential work you slowly dive deeper and deeper in each character as they say and do things. The cover is a photograph, frozen in a moment in time, or sometimes something more abstract, like the idea behind what the story is about, or the idea you want to plant inside the reader’s mind hoping it will grow in curiosity so that the reader will go search the book and see what the story is really about.

Be safe. Be kind. Be curious.
Pa-ZOW!

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
October 7th, 2024