How to Make a Mini-Concertina Book, with Detachable Water-Pots

[by Lynne Chapman, in England) I am starting a mini artist-in-residence job next week, working with academics again on Dementia research. My first day of sketching is on Monday, so I needed new sketchbooks to draw in.

All the concertinas I made for the Morgan Centre residency got used up, so I made new ones. Also a new cover, as the residency one was used almost to destruction. The 2m long concertinas had to be created from a big roll, and that was a bit of a performance. I won’t need so many books this time, so I decided to make shorter ones, using regular sheets of watercolour paper. I thought you might like to know the details, in case you fancy making some for yourself.

I bought full imperial sheets of Bockingford, which are 30 x 22inches. I started with the 300gm, but it felt like overkill for the shorter length books, so I started using the 190gm instead, which is much easier to fold.

I got 3 books out of each sheet. From the 22 inch, short side of the sheet, I measured for three strips (3 x 7.4 inches), for the height of each concertina. Then I measured down the longer edge, for the folds. Allowing for each facet to be 5 inches, you get 6 facets per book.

The trick is to score and fold the whole sheet at once, before cutting it into strips. This saves a lot of time. You only score every other fold by the way, because the folds are going to go in opposite directions. You can easily hand-fold the ones going the other way, once you’ve folded the scored ones. Make sense?

Then you flatten out the sheet again and use a long ruler to cut it into the 3 strips. They are only short, but will still work fine.

I made my cover the same way as before, but with the little embellishment of a decorative fabric strip you can see in the top picture, plus another more important modification: I extended the back cover by 1.5 inches, so that I could clip on a water container. It’s actually designed for oil painting, for oil and turps, but the two little tubs will be perfect for dirty and clean water and mean I can paint more easily in awkward places where I need to stand.

They have a clip on the back which fits just right on the board – good and tight.

While I was in sketchbook-making mode, I played with some different sizes. I cut the paper differently and got different shaped books. Out of the same imperial sheet, I got two books of 6 inches x 9 inches, plus one diddy, landscape-format book from the waste, which measures 4 inches x 6 inches.

I had to make covers to fit them too. I did the water-extension for the big one, but decided to keep the little one more compact, for slipping in a rucksack when we go out walking.

The great thing about this system is that you can use the cover over and over – you just pop in a new strip of paper. You can use an elastic band to hold the book shut when you’re not using it. I did away with the fancy Velcro tab I used before: I quickly lost the tab.

You are supposed to use book board to make the covers, but I ran out, so I used regular mount board, which worked fine except for a very slight warping, from the PVA glue, which I put right by clipping the cover shut while it was drying (using a couple of bits of scrap card to protect it from getting dints from the clip):

The other thing I didn’t bother with was the card insert on the back cover, for sliding the concertina paper into. I found that I generally wanted to fold the paper in different ways as I was working, so I could paint on more than 2 facets at once, which meant I stopped using the insert. It works perfectly well just tucked in loose.

I took it out on a test run on Saturday, with Urban Sketchers Yorkshire. It worked a treat, though the water pots are quite tiny, so you have to be pretty careful if you are using them indoors, as I was when I did this painting, in an antiques shop:

Much better for working on the street, in situations where you need to stand and paint and don’t have a handy wall for your water.