I was talking to my friend Patrick this past week on a trip I took to Philly (Patrick happens to be an amazing artist who keeps great sketchbooks I’ll have to photograph one day) and he mentioned how much he loves moleskines. I really never noticed anything so spectacular about them, they are just small sketchbooks, but he thinks the paper can hold watercolor like none other. I noticed a lot of artists love moleskines and remembered this amazing project going on to share moleskines called Detour. Artists like Paula Scher, Spike Jonze, Maira Kalman, and Ruben Toledo share the contents of their moleskines. From the site you can watch YouTube videos of the pages turning (just click more on the artist’s bio). It’s pretty addictive so make sure you have some time before going to the site.

I have found many photographs of artists moleskines on Flickr which I wanted to share today and tomorrow. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Flickr (where have you been?), it’s an online space to store and share photographs. Since it’s online, you can browse through people’s photos from around the world. For artists, it’s a great way to showcase your work and share it with like-minded artists across continents. I could go on and on about the features of Flickr- you have contacts, and can save favorite pictures, comment, etc. But one feature is especially interesting- you can create a Pool on a certain topic. So I could create a Pool called Moleskines and everyone who had a picture related to that topic would add their photo to it. Well, Moleskine City happens to be a Pool as well as Moleskinerie, Moleskine:One Page at a Time, Moleskine’s Snobs and even a few more. I’ve scanned a few of these Pools and lots of artists pages and wanted to share some of my favorite moleskine pages.

These are from the3robbers who’s profile says he’s a 3rd year art school student from Cardiff, UK. He makes a lot of his imagery using solvent transfers (you paint the back of a photocopied image with paint thinner or wintergreen oil and then rub the paper from the back onto a new paper). I always love the washed out texture those transfers make and I think the3robbers uses the medium well with interesting compositions. You can see more pages out of his moleskines here. You can also watch video tours of his books here and here.

These next pictures are from David Fullarton’s moleskine. His work is full of little funny writings and drawings often on top of collaged papers. It’s so inviting with personal bits that make you smile. I love every photo in this set. David is located in San Francisco and you can purchase some of his drawings here. (the image on the homepage for this post is also his.)

Irina Troitskaya seems so prolific. She is one of my contacts so I get to see when she posts new photos which seems to be almost every day. She has a whole set of 103 photos devoted to her moleskines which are beautiful. She also has a website which luckily happens to be in English even though Irina is located in Moscow Russia.

Hanssolo (aka Hannah Sheffield) fills her moleskine pages up with the craziest most intricate patterns. I can’t imagine having the patience to do patterns that intense. Check out her set of drawings here. Hannah also has a website with some other fun work here.

Tomorrow I’ll be back with four new artists. Thanks to the3robbers, David, Irina and Hannah for letting me share your awesome work.

© Julia Rothman 2007