December 31st, 2010

Shopping Challenged

by Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman

Am I the only person who can spend a week in Florence, Italy without finding something to buy?

My daughter and I walked for miles every day past shops full of shoes, suits, ties, leather jackets, scarves, and every plastic iteration of “The David” imaginable. It wasn’t until we found an ancient cavelike shop full of leather-bound sketchbooks that my credit card began to twitch. Oh, she’s a beauty.

My wife brought me a small brown version of these Italian sketchbooks some years ago, probably from this same shop. It’s now my coffee shop sketchbook and it’s compiling a nice legacy of decent strip ideas.

Not that a sketchbook has to be fancy, of course. I’ve got shelves of beat-up spiral-bound sketchbooks with some of my best ideas in them. A tour of my sketchbook shelves in a blog post ahead.