As I continued to work through my latest sketchbook I came upon another one of the fold out pages. I had pasted a few extra fold out pages into my sketchbook never realizing the extent of the design challenge I’d have.

This time I had no idea what to do. Days went by, then weeks. Finally I sat down and drew out a few of my ideas. This is the design I decided to use drawn to scale in a squared Moleskine notebook. 

The very act of drawing the thumbnail design fueled my desire to finally deal with the spread. 

I drew a few maple leaves, painted the background and cut out a circle instead of cutting around the spiky bits of the leaves as I had originally planned. It’s good to reconsider a questionable plan instead of slavishly following a design that could easily fail. 

Time to paint those leaves… look! I added a leaf in the cut-out!

When the left page is folded out the lyrics to one of my favorite jazz standards, “Autumn Leaves”, are revealed.

If I hadn’t taken a few minutes to draw out some of my ideas I would still be looking at these pages wondering what to do. 

Thumbnail sketches to the rescue!