Polar Graph/circular Grid Notebooks?

[niccig]

Do fp-friendly polar graph notebooks exist? I'd like to have one for working on mandalas. I've seen a few on amazon but haven't been able to find much about whether they work well with fountain pen ink. Alternately, any suggestions on binding paper other than circa discs? I could print my own, but I'm not at all a fan of disc bound notebooks.

[bogiesan]

Sketching, layout, and conceptual tablets are usually compromises between size, binding, paper quality, and, of course, cost. About all you can do is research the brands you found on amazon and see if reviewers of other tablets found them useful for fountain pens. Papers that have goo results when using water based felt tips should work well with fountain pen inks. But the tooth of the paper may be inappropriate for the nibs and may quickly shred and clog a split tine delivery system. Most mathematical and engineering graph systems I have used have paper designed for pencils. And that was ages ago. You could also explore data recording systems that use circular disk blanks. These systems often use a stylus that looks a lot like a fountain pen to deliver the line. Power plants once used such recording graphs, sometimes driven by clockwork mechanisms, to record generation output and system. demand using red and blue inks on the same disk.

 

If preserving your layouts of your mandala artwork is important to you, print your own on paper you trust. You can take your pages to any print shop and have them glued on the edge. Or you could take your Illustrator file to the print shop and ask to test their paper stocks. They’ll print and bind your notebooks for you. You just throw money at them to get the size, quantity, and binding style you want.

 

I also stumbled across a few different mandala user discussion forums while researching this idea. Maybe their users have ideas for you. Most of these were in the new age (now that new age is old) and art therapy realms.

[PJohnP]

Truth be told, you might well be best served by creating a design on exactly the paper you want, not compromising on others' design, paper, printing and binding. I've done this, albeit not with polar coordinates, using wonderful paper, and then punching it to fit my Arc notebook.

 

How to do it ? Well, there are a number of online templates you can start with, such as :

https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/polar/

https://www.waterproofpaper.com/graph-paper/polar-graph-paper.shtml

 

Depending on your ultimate needs, you could print on a colour or B&W laser printer (inkjets are not as strongly indicated for this effort), or take the design to a print shop. Fainter or darker coordinate grid ? Colour or B&W grid ? Smaller or larger ? You decide...

 

I noodled around with several designs for my work-related notebook, adding a header, changing the layout around, and so forth. My early attempts were "just about" good enough, but I eventually hit what I wanted, and I've now used that format for most of a decade. If we were in a similar part of the country, I'd offer to show you some of these tests, but I'm over in the Southwest, a long way from your location.

 

Obviously, your needs will not be same as those of others, so binding or punching or gluing will be to your desire. I would recommend trying out several quite widely variant designs at first in looseleaf or punched arrangements, and then you could decide where the better lines of design fall for you. You might well decide to switch papers around as well, but the combinations of designs and papers are such that it's best to settle on the design first, then the paper, then the binding format. *

 

Do let us know how all of this works out - success stories, even including the missteps leading to those great results, are a vital part of this forum !

 

 

 

John P.

 

 

* Do be warned that this can be a descent (ascent ?) into a number of related areas of discussion here in FPN, including leatherworked covers, specialist punch systems, bookbinding, paper treatments, and onward. It's a fascinating journey, but it can lead to some much longer term projects. I've had a design for a traveler's style Arc-bound notebook percolating on the mental backburner for several years. I have the leather, I have the design, I have most of the tools, but the time, alas, has not been available for completion. Warning, warning... <warm smile>

[tim77]

Are you ok with an A5-format notebook? If so then print and stitch-bind your own graph paper. It's quite quick and easy to do. Half-a-dozen sheets and a card cover gives you 24 pages.