The Sketchbook That Thinks in Ovals: Introducing CIRCOL

Most sketchbooks are rectangles. They have corners, edges, a top and a bottom. They tell you, quietly but firmly, how to fill them: left to right, top to bottom, one page at a time. They are useful objects. They are also, in a small but persistent way, bossy.

Olivia Williamson's CIRCOL sketchbook is not a rectangle.

The Shape of the Thing

Open a CIRCOL sketchbook flat and what you have is an oval — a single, uninterrupted ellipse of paper with no corners, no margins, no obvious place to begin. The shape offers no instructions. It simply waits.

This turns out to matter more than you might expect. The rectangle, for all its practicality, carries assumptions: that drawing is a left-to-right activity, that the page has a top, that composition means filling a frame. The oval dissolves all of this. There is no frame. There is only the shape itself, and whatever you choose to put inside it.

Artists who work in CIRCOL sketchbooks consistently report the same thing: the oval makes them draw differently. More freely. More instinctively. As though the absence of corners removes a kind of inhibition they didn't know they had.

The CIRCOL x Willi's Editions

The connection between CIRCOL and Willi's Wine Bar is a natural one. Both are built on the belief that the objects we use to make and enjoy art should be as considered as the art itself — that a sketchbook, like a wine glass or a poster, is not merely a vessel but a participant.

The two Willi's collaboration editions bring that belief into vivid focus. The CIRCOL x Willi's Wine Bar Sketchbook DANCING GIRAFFES is exactly what it sounds like: joyful, unexpected, the kind of image that makes you want to open the book immediately and see what happens inside. The CIRCOL x Willi's Wine Bar Sketchbook RED DOG has a different energy — warmer, more intimate, with the particular charm of an animal that seems entirely at home in a wine bar.

Both covers were designed with the same spirit that has guided the Bottle Art collection for over four decades: commission something original, trust the artist, and see what arrives.

The Original CIRCOL Editions

Alongside the Willi's collaborations, we also carry two editions from the original CIRCOL range. The CIRCOL Sketchbook BLUE RABBIT and the CIRCOL Sketchbook GOLDEN RABBIT share the same oval format and the same quality of paper — smooth enough for ink and pencil, with enough tooth for watercolour and gouache — in covers that are quieter in palette but no less considered in design.

They make excellent companions to the Willi's editions, and together the four form a small collection in their own right: four ovals, four covers, four invitations to draw without corners.

Who They Are For

CIRCOL sketchbooks are for anyone who draws — but they are particularly well suited to people who feel, even slightly, that the rectangle has been getting in their way. Illustrators who want to break a habit. Painters who sketch. Writers who doodle. People who have never thought of themselves as artists but are curious what would happen if they tried.

The oval is a generous shape. It does not judge. It does not demand a particular kind of mark. It simply offers itself, and waits to see what you do.

Which is, when you think about it, exactly what a good sketchbook should do.

Browse all four CIRCOL editions: Dancing Giraffes, Red Dog, Blue Rabbit, and Golden Rabbit.