2026-10-17 - art burst!

i'm thoroughly surprised at myself and how my art has been going. a week or two ago i got a new sketchbook, mostly because an artist i follow on youtube uses almost exclusively those, when she doesn't make one herself. i've never seen them out in the wild, but the art store with the Good Paper Selection had one last one when i went to replace some used up pencil colors. and something about it really unlocked things for me. i think it's the quality and the size. quality: despite being a hardcover it has a lay-flat binding. the pages are a warm white. somehow that's a difficult thing to come by in sketchbooks, a white page. they're very often some variation of cream and i hate how that distorts the colors i want to use. the paper's thick enough that it doesn't deform the next three pages if i have to press down a bit harder to lay down color. and it doesn't warp when playing with ink. in short - the paper doesn't argue or conflict with what i'm trying to do, it becomes an invisible…