Category: sketchbook

Setting out

I’m feeling settled enough in our new home to think about starting some new work, and I’ve made a start in a spiral bound square sketchbook that I’ve had for a little while. Sometimes these things only speak to you when they’re ready.

Of course I had to make a cover for it, as I do for most of my sketchbooks. I find it helps to illuminate some of the themes, as well as providing a little extra protection for the contents.

The cover wraps around the spiral binding and meets itself on the front. It’s not my usual colour palette:

wraparound cover for square sketchbook

I’m using a Two Rivers plein air pocket sketchbook, which has alternating pages of watercolour paper and cartridge paper. The pages are about 7.5″ square, so a nice manageable size.

sketchbook cover

I like pockets in sketchbooks. Actually I like pockets full stop. In my youth I went through a phase of wearing men’s vintage jackets purely because of the number and quantity of pockets, which utterly delighted me. I would keep finding extra hidden pockets all over the garment, inside and out. We no longer say the word pockets in our house. We always say pocketses, a la Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.

pocketses are great

I’ve been using the watercolour-paper pages for direct painting, and the cartridge-paper pages for collaging.

So far it’s all very loose and sketchy, blending colours, shapes and words. I’m cutting the words from an old poetry anthology to create found poems, which is helping to navigate the direction.

ink and watercolour on TwoRivers watercolour paper

I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be yet, or where it might be going, but between us (me and the work) we will find a path. Or maybe this is enough. I think it’s leading somewhere, as most things do.

sketchbook page: be prepared

Some of it is already looking like textile work.

probably the beginnings of a quilt

This page is just ink on wet paper with salt sprinkled over it. I enjoy the unpredictability of this kind of work. Play, really.

ink with salt

It’s a voyage of discovery as always, exactly like life. Travelling through time, we never know what will happen next. And yet, on we go.

Autos-optos

During a routine dental check-up some years ago, my Greek dentist once caused me some alarm by announcing that he was going to begin his autopsy. Noticing my rabbit-in-headlights expression, he calmly explained the etymology – the Greek translation of the word is something like ‘seen for myself’. I’m not the most relaxed dental patient and it was helpful to have this (slightly nervous) laugh at the time.

And of course, seeing for yourself is always the best way to learn. I drew some masking fluid on a page of my colour palettes sketchbook before adding watercolour. And – surprise – it doesn’t work.

note to self: masking fluid doesn’t work on this paper

You can see where it was, and it does act as a resist of sorts, but it doesn’t rub off in the normal way when the paint is dry. It lies underneath as a separate layer and sinks into the paper rather than sitting on the surface. I’ve added some pen marks over the top to enhance the effect here and there. I don’t know if it’s because this paper hasn’t been sized, or whether the surface is just too soft. The reason doesn’t really matter; the fact is it doesn’t work as I’d expected. But now I know, having seen for myself.

watercolour and pen on soft cotton rag paper

As always, I can see some of these designs working in textiles with stitch, but for now it’s just an exercise on paper. It’s been a hectic week, and paint on paper is one of my best ways to relax and recover some equilibrium.

I use a separate small square sketchbook for testing paint colours before committing to the thing in progress, and I really like the little abstract compositions that happen purely by accident:

testing, testing – and yes, masking fluid DOES work on cartridge paper

Another long bank holiday weekend here in the UK – whatever your plans are, enjoy some time out.

Still on paper

One of those strange conundrums – the older I get, the slower I become, but the faster time passes. That makes a net loss multiplied by two, according to my flawed logic.

There is no rush, of course, and everything takes as long as it takes. There just never seems to be enough time to do all the things I want to do.

So I am still on paper and got distracted by noticing I was running low on collage paper, so had to stop and paint some more. Actually this is one of my favourite activities. I use inks, paints and mark-making tools of various kinds to liven up old book pages, envelopes, junk mail etc. Loosening up and splashing some colour around makes for a very happy (slightly messy) afternoon.

painted collage papers in progress

The sketchbooks I made for the shop last week disappeared in about an hour, so I’ve made a few more – these are the last of them, for now at least.

blank sketchbooks, cotton rag paper with vintage silk ribbons and collage papers

And finally, in what’s turning out to be more of a news roundup than any kind of meaningful post, I’m really happy to have had my work featured by My Modern Met. You can read the article here.

thank you, My Modern Met

Bookmaking

Sketchbook-making, obviously. I prefer to make my own because I like to vary the paper content and size of the pages. Readymade sketchbooks are usually variations on A4 and I don’t always like the proportions.

sketchbooks, newly made

The little book with the wraparound cover below is for experimenting with various forms of ink. I have acrylic ink, ink/stamp pads, inktense blocks, and a few distress crayons, plus the more obvious drawing pens etc.

little book of ink

Just somewhere to try dripping, blotting, stamping, stencilling etc with various kinds of ink. My favourite thing so far is drawing with a little twig dipped in ink.

monochrome ink swipe with twig as drawing tool

The spread below was made by sponging yellow/purple ink onto damp paper and then using the twig to draw in the green marks. A few random splatters is always very satisfying.

ink used loosely like watercolour

I also quite like the distress crayons, which you can smudge with a bit of water. This is the wrong kind of paper really (it’s very soft cotton rag), as it won’t stand up to too much rubbing. I’ll probably try this again on more robust paper.

Tim Holtz distress crayons smudged with water

I made more sketchbooks than I will use, so I’ve added a handful or so to the shop.

blank sketchbooks ready for action

A beginning

Daily paint doodles have produced these little pictograms, influenced by prehistoric art and the images found on rocks and in caves everywhere in the ancient world:

Daily paint sketches, watercolour on cotton paper with pen added

Prehistoric art is something I’ve always found really interesting. Not so much the figurative drawings of the various beasts fleeing from human hunters, but more the abstract mark-making and simple patterns. They seem to crop up everywhere from the same kind of time. Shapes like circles, spirals, wavy lines, squares, short lines – basic marks. These are the marks I make most often in my sketchbooks too, and a lot of the shapes will translate very effectively from pen to needle and thread.

Sketches for long cloths

I’ve prepared a few long cloths, about 10” x 40-ish”, for adding timeless marks with thread. Just to see where it goes. I’m using linen or cotton as the backing fabric, and brushed cotton in place of batting. The top layers are strips of hand-dyed silk, cotton, and linen.

Long cloth ready to begin

I’m beginning with circular blanket stitch on hand-dyed textured silk fabric and looking forward to following the thread.

Circular blanket stitch on textured silk

Custom colour palette

I’ve been looking for a set of good quality watercolours but haven’t been able to find anything that doesn’t include a lot of colours I would never use. After falling down a few online watercolour rabbit holes, I found that you can make your own half-pan set from tubes.

Imagine the possibilities! I have quite a few little tubes already – probably far too many, but colour is too enticing to resist, and I will use it all eventually. I’m not a painter, but I do like to paint. Getting all the tubes out feels like too much hassle and mess for a quick sketchbook page, so making a pan set with the colours I’ve already got is the perfect solution.

Sketchbook page in progress: handmade sketchbook made with deckle-edge cotton paper. Drawn details are Posca paint pens and Signo uniball white pen

You can buy empty watercolour tins quite cheaply, and many of them come with empty half pans ready to fill from tubes.

Empty pan set with samples of colours I’ve already got

The result is a perfect set of watercolours, conveniently in a metal box that takes seconds to set up.

Custom water colour palette

There’s a lot of green, but then that’s what I like. There’s a mix of brands here – mostly Daniel Smith, with some Winsor & Newton, Schmincke, and Jacksons. They all sit quite happily together and mix well. Some set harder than others, but it seems to make no difference to the paint itself. The Jacksons paints still haven’t set hard after a few days, but this palette lives in a drawer and won’t be carried around, so I don’t think it matters if it doesn’t set.

I’d like to spend a bit of each day on sketchbook work, and this convenient set-up will make it so much easier to restart a daily practice. I’ve been doing some doodles just to see what happens and already they look like possible textile/stitch samples.

Sketchbook pages

This is what Sunday mornings are for, right?

New book, old cover

This week I’ve made a notebook using some light weight cotton rag paper – somewhere to collect colour palettes, swatches, and notes about colour.

Sketchbook page with colour notes

The paper signatures were easy enough – just folded pairs that could be stitched to the spine of a cover. The cover itself literally dropped through the letter box one day. I cut a corrugated cardboard mailer box to size and painted it white:

Free! Corrugated cardboard mailer cut down to size

The depth of the box turned out to be exactly the right size for a spine to fit the pile of signatures:

Signatures stitched to cardboard cover

I painted some abaca tissue paper with acrylic inks and collaged/stencilled it a bit and used that to cover the white cardboard. I’ve reinforced the spine with another layer of painted tissue.

Little book of colour (front)
Little book of colour (back)

You can still see the texture of corrugated cardboard underneath the colour but it’s functioning pretty well as a book.

Next job this week is to find a way through these, when they’re dry:

Hand dyed threads – it’s like waiting for thread to dry

If I can get through them all (and if I can stop myself from keeping them!) they’ll be available from next week.

Play day

In my new life of freedom from the nine to five treadmill, I’m trying to set aside Fridays for research and development (AKA playing).

I was given these beautiful super-granulation Schmincke watercolours for Christmas but have been really busy since January and I’ve been trying to set aside some time to try them. It turns out today was the day.

Schmincke super granulation watercolour set ‘Forest’

I’m no great watercolourist but what I like most about watercolour paints is that it’s quite hard to make anything look ugly. I really like the granulation effect.

Watercolour sketches, about 2” x 4”
Single colour sketch, wet on wet, lines made with a stick
In progress

Hope your Friday is as happy as mine.

The inner critic

Imposter Syndrome, inner critic, Captain Failure, whatever you call it – I feel as if I finally understand it, and this understanding has truly changed my life. It’s one of the many amazing things I’m learning from the incredible Stacie Bloomfield and her Leverage Your Art online course.

Having been beaten down countless times (for decades) by the inner critic’s ‘you’re not good enough’ mantra, I now understand it for what it is. It’s just a part of my brain that doesn’t like change and is frightened by risk-taking. It comes up with what it thinks are valid reasons to prevent my doing something that doesn’t feel safe.

In a real life-or-death situation that’s immensely useful, and the inner critic is actually your greatest protector if it tells you that you really shouldn’t jump out of a tenth floor window. The problem is that the inner critic can’t always tell the difference between a genuine life-threatening change and a personal challenge, so it tells you the same limiting things over and over again until you can no longer tell the difference either. It seems to me that you and the inner critic grow together and you just get used to not questioning its advice.

I’ve nearly finished the right-brain business plan, and am including the inner critic just so I don’t forget that sometimes it tells me things that may not be true.

The inner critic: actually my greatest protector who doesn’t like to admit that they are sometimes wrong

Underneath all of those life-limiting nonsense messages is the truth – that somewhere in there, a part of your brain is afraid that you will die if you change. You can’t grow if you don’t take occasional considered risks. It’s not natural to stand still or stay the same. Everything changes eventually.

So finally I’m recognising that messages like ‘you don’t deserve this’ and ‘this will never work’ are just really, really silly.

Heart of Soil sketchbook

Settle down with a cup of tea or something because there are lots of pictures today.

You might recall I enrolled on the Heart of Soil online workshop last month – you can see my earlier post about it here. I collected all the lessons into a little sketchbook, and it’s been a lot of fun to revisit some techniques I haven’t used for a while. I particularly liked the limited colour palette – just blues and yellows – and the pages in the resulting book are nicely coordinated.

Front cover with strip of hand dyed silk wrapped around
Front and back covers
String of Hearts class taught by Tiffany Sharpe
Bluebird of Peace class taught by Megan Quinlan (mine is a blue tit, since I think that’s the closest thing we have to a bluebird in the UK)
Buds class taught by Michelle Schratz

I went a bit off-piste with some of these and added some lines from a vintage poetry anthology to some of the pages, and I added a teabag pocket to this one too. I made a stencil from Tyvek for the background leaf and flower images.

The lines of poetry on the page below are from a Rupert Brooke poem, mixed up to create a found poem.

Pebbles and Peace classes taught by Leaca Young
Paper doll class (I adapted this one a fair bit just to get it on the page) taught by Kim Smith (@slaphappystudios on Instagram) and painted watercolour tubes class taught by Kelly Hoernig (@kellyhoernig.artist on Instagram)
Watercolour wildflower garden class taught by Tracey Wozniak
Watercolour/mixed media backgrounds and mark making class taught by DeeDee Catron
The one-page journal technique, shared by Kiala Givehand (@kialagives on Instagram) and a sunflower for Ukraine taught by Lorraine Bell (@lorraine_bell on Instagram)

Of course the sketchbook itself is based on the one-page sketchbook technique (you fold a single sheet of paper, cut it strategically and fold it into an eight-page booklet) but I thought it would be fun to make a tiny sketchbook to tuck inside the bigger one. The smaller version is made from a sheet of A4 paper; just me enjoying myself, really.

Collaged pages in mini-sketchbook with various marks and papers
Pages from mini-sketchbook, collaged and painted, with lines from a vintage poetry anthology

I thought it might be fun to include a little video run-through but then I noticed the colour of my hands and thought I ought to explain. I did some dyeing this morning and – I do it every time – forgot to put the gloves back on when rinsing. My hands are not normally purple, just in case anyone is worried.

A very happy collection of classes and I enjoyed them immensely. Next up, I’m doing the Traveller Blanket course with the lovely Dijanne Cevaal and am looking forward to that. Next year I hope to be teaching online classes myself, and I’ve figured that the best way to see what works is to sign up for a few myself. And of course there is always something new to learn.