Stocking Stuffer Ideas for Sketchers

If there’s a sketcher in your life and you’re looking for some stocking stuffers for them, here are a few ideas:

Sweat Bands

These are not only useful for tennis players, they’re great for Urban Sketchers or anyone who sketches on the go. You can find them very cheaply at any sports brand store, and they’re oftentimes discounted (so you can splurge on brand named ones). You wear one of these on your wrist as you use your waterbrush, and you can quickly and conveniently clean your brush on it. When it gets too “colourful” (pun intended) you just toss it into the washing machine. I have two pairs of these in rotation at all times (one from Nike and one from Lululemon, both cost about $5), and they’re an integral part of my portable watercolour kit.

Waterbrush

These are inexpensive and every sketcher can use one – even if they have one or two already. They can be used with watercolour or filled with a mixture of ink and water and used for sketches on the go.

Small Spray Water Bottle

These are great for anyone who uses watercolours. They can be used to quickly clean your palette, to wet your paint pans, to create effects on your paper, or even to play with ink. Plus, even if they have one, another one will still come in handy.

Fineliner Pens

My favourites are Staedtler but Sakura may be more widely available (Uniball and Zebra also make good ones). In any case a 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7 will always be appreciated, even if they already have them. Buy black and not any wild colours, and avoid buying the Copic metal ones because they’re needlessly expensive.

Excellent Pencils

These can be a bit more expensive, depending on the quantity you buy them in, but Tombow Mono 100 pencils in 2B, B, H, F and/or HB or Mistubishi Hi-Uni also in 2B, B, H, F and/or HB would be greatly appreciated. Add a Tombow Mono Light eraser or a kneaded eraser for added thoughtfulness. If you can only purchase one harness, go for B or 2B, unless they work exclusively in watercolour, in which point go for F or H.

Faber-Castell Pitt Brush Pens

These are waterproof, and great for quick sketches. The tips wear down relatively quickly so even if they have them already, additional ones will be appreciated. Go for cool greys or just wild on the colours, and make sure that they’re brush pens, not fineliners (there’s a B on the end of the pen that denotes brush tip).

I’d skip the black, because for that there’s:

Pentel Pocket Brush (GFKP)

A favourite with sketchers, cartoonists and calligraphers, this is the best black India ink brush pen that you can find. Throw in a a few refill cartridges or a Uni-ball Signo Broad white gel pen if you’re feeling generous.

Stillman and Birn Pocket Alpha Sketchbook

A favourite among Urban Sketchers for good reason, this pocket sketchbook can take anything you can throw at it, has a plenty of pages, and can take a beating. Don’t be tempted by the Beta paper, it’s thicker but also contains fewer pages. Throw in a Fineliner or a Bic (you can splurge for a golden one if you’re bored), and a binder clip to keep the sketchbook closed and you have a complete Urban Sketcher set.

My battered and well-loved Stillman &Birn Pocket Alpha with a Field Notes rubber band to keep it closed.

Hopefully you’ll find some inspiration in this list. If you have any more ideas for stocking stuffers for sketchers, please write them in the comments below. Happy holidays!

Two thank you cards and Schmincke Aqua Bronze review

I’m coming on my two year anniversary from the end of my chemo (it’s at the end of next month, so basically on Christmas Eve), and I have a check up with my hemato-oncologist in two days. I sketched this to give her with a box of pralines, a small token of my gratitude for the past two and a half years:

It’s a new kind of paper so it came out a bit more blotchy than I’d like, which made me want to play with it a bit more. I wanted to make another quick card for one of my mom’s doctors, who’s retiring, so I had some pigment fun:

If you don’t like granulating watercolours then you’d hate this paper.

I then used Schmincke’s Aqua Bronze rich gold to add some writing to it. Aqua Bronze is basically a small jar full of glitter powder that you mix with a little bit of water (a very, very small bit of water) on your palette and it turns into metallic watercolour. Unlike other metallic watercolours Aqua Bronze has good coverage and opacity, and it really pops off the page. It’s the very last thing you add to your drawing, after everything else has completely (and I mean completely) dried up. You need very little of the powder and even less water, a cheap plastic palette and a cheap synthetic brush and you’re all set.

There are several different kinds of metallic hues, and they all work the same. Do remember that you want to use a cheap brush and a palette you don’t care about because this is glitter. You also don’t want to clean the brush in your regular water pot, or to use the same water for another drawing later on. Aqua Bronze sticks to everything, and you can’t ensure that it was completely cleaned out of your tools, so don’t use your best brush or your usual palette for this.

You mix up the powder with a tiny bit of water and a bit of patience (it takes less water and more time than you think) and then apply it to your dry drawing. The paint stays in place but if you brush your fingers on it, they will come out with a fine dusting of glitter. Here’s how it turned out:

If you want even more opacity, you’re going to have to use a paint marker. In this case I wanted the yellow in the abstract blue rose to be reflected in the thank you written in gold so I wanted the soft edges of the Aqua Bronze.

If you’re thinking about creating watercolour holiday cards and want to add a little bling to them, Aqua Bronze could be an option. I’d select one colour as the jars aren’t cheap, and I’d finish the sketches and then add the glitter highlights in one batch.

Kitten sketches and a dilemma

I’m torn between writing a post explaining why the calls for ceasefire are utterly disconnected from Hamas’s ceasefire record, the safety of the 240 kidnapped, and the safety of everyone living in the area, and creating an escapist post filled with cat nonsense and pen stuff. On the one hand I want to educate people, on the other hand if people wanted to be educated they’d spend 3 minutes googling before posting fictional maps of the area, calling for “ceasefire now” and ignoring Hamas leadership’s own disownment of their people, saying that they aren’t their responsibility, and having zero qualms about using them as human shield to provoke just the kind of reaction that they’re getting on social media.

So here are kitten sketches, and please take the time to fact check stuff you like and repost on the internet, even if it came from your favourite hairdresser or singer.

Inktober 2023 Day 27

Three rocket attacks today and I’m getting ready for an uneasy night. They’re sending them in large waves so Iron Dome missed a few and there direct hits and more wounded people today.

In better news the stray black kitten that my mom and brother saved is back from her stay at the vet’s (she had to have her tail removed after she was run over by a car). She’s so friendly and fearless the vet thinks that she belonged to someone who threw her out (a common fate with black cats in particular). But now she has a great forever home and she’s having the time of her life:

Adopt, don’t shop.

Inktober 2023 Day 23

No rockets last night and so far no rockets today. Could this be the first quiet day we’ve had in three weeks? The north and south weren’t so lucky, of course.

Went on a short run within running distance of a shelter, and saw some monk parrots and a crow scrounging for treats in the grass. Small moments of normalcy in the madness we are living in now.

A young woman I work with was drafted on the terrible Saturday of the 7th of October and has been on active duty ever since. I sketched her today, to cheer her up. I hope she gets to come back to the office safe and sound and hang the sketch on her office cork-board.

Inktober 2023 Day 7: Pink Antelopes

I wasn’t in the mood to sketch these, but I decided to sketch them anyway. Pelikan Souverän M600 vintage Tortoise Shell brown fine nib with Pilot Iroshizuku Yama Budo.

Rockets on Tel Aviv

Woke up at 6:30 to rocket sirens. Multiple barrages, terrorists breached the fence, dead and wounded on the morning of the Sukkot holiday. Sketched this between barrages.

Schmincke Super Granulation Volcano Watercolour Trio Review

If you use watercolours you usually find yourself in one of two camps: those who want as much control of their painting as possible and so hate granulating watercolours, and those who love the magic of granulating pigments, and the unexpected effects they create. For the first few years that I was using watercolours I hated the “cauliflower” and “graininess” of granulating watercolours and so I actively avoided those pigments. Nowadays I have several granulating watercolours on my palette (and two super granulating ones) and I enjoy the watercolour magic and pigment parties that they create.

A few years ago Schmincke started issuing “super granulation” watercolours, which are watercolours with extra pronounced granulation effects and two different pigments in the same paint – something that created a dual colour effect and added tons of texture to any painting they were used in.

I reviewed the first of those paints here, and since then Schmincke have come out with three more series of super granulation paints: Shire, Desert and Volcano. Of the three the Volcano interested me the most as it seemed to fill in a gap that the very blue and green leaning previous sets were missing: warm, red hues. As Schmincke watercolours aren’t cheap, and the full volcano set came out to more than I was willing to pay for just to experiment with, I purchased a trio box of 5ml tubes to try out.

The trio I got contained 913 Volcano Red, 914 Volcano Violet and 915 Volcano Brown. The one that I was most interested in was the volcano red. The one that I ended liking the most is the one that I had the least expectation for: volcano brown.

I filled three half pans with paint and let them dry out for 24 hours (Schmincke watercolours are much easier to pan fill than Daniel Smith as they come out of the tube better and they dry quicker). I then did a colour swab for each, and a paint test with three paint consistencies (honey, milk, tea as Marc Taro Holmes calls them): the first with very little water, the second with more pigment than water and the third with very little pigment. In the case of the volcano brown I overdid the water in the tea swab, so it’s much lighter than the rest.

Volcano red is semi-transparent and semi-staining, volcano violet is semi-opaque and semi-staining, and volcano brown is semi-opaque and staining. The opacity-transparency spectrum in watercolours is important if you mix watercolours, as the more opaque a paint is the less well it mixes and the more chance you’ll get a “muddy” mixture out it. It is also important for layering, as opaque paints will not layer as well as transparent ones. For this reason I use opaque and semi-opaque paints sparingly, and usually only during the final stages of my painting.

Staining is a measure of how easy it is to “lift” the paint off the page with water or by dabbing it off, should you need to. The more staining the paint, the harder it is to lift without leaving a stain behind (this also depends on the paper you use, of course).

Looking at the paints, the volcano brown shows dual brown and red pigments, the volcano violet shows red and purple pigments, and the red shows red and maybe orange pigments, but it’s hard to tell. The volcano brown is the most dramatic and interesting of the three, though the volcano red is by far the most granulating of them.

I tried to create a sketch using only these paints (on 100% cotton watercolour paper) and boy do they show their super granulating properties. while the volcano red by itself isn’t impressive, it does layer spectacularly well on the other two paints, and the volcano brown adds a lot of interest and drama to the painting. Of the three I’m likely to add the volcano brown into the rotation, and perhaps, for certain effects, the volcano red. The violet would come in handy if I was working on portraits maybe, but otherwise it reminds me of potter pink: a pigment that is too washed out to be of any regular use in my palette, and not worth the space when it comes to keeping it around for mixing purposes.

If you’re just building your watercolour palette, these paints are not for you. However, if you have an established palette and a certain style of painting that favours texture and layering, I’d recommend giving at least some of the Schmincke super granulation watercolours a try. They are bound to result in something interesting and unexpected.

Inktober 2023 Day 6: Grey Elephant

I enjoy sketching with grey inks, so I oftentimes have a pen filled with a grey ink of some kind or another. Today’s selection is the Pelikan Souverän M605 Stresemann with a medium nib (which as it’s a gold nibbed Pelikan, verges on the broad) filled with Diamine Silver Fox. Silver Fox is from Diamine’s 150th anniversary collection (one of the original ones they issued), and is a slightly warmish medium grey with fantastic shading.

African elephants are pretty fun to sketch, so I may be tempted to sketch another one of them later this month.

If you’re looking for a grey ink that’s well behaved, offers a lot of shading, is readable even in fine nibs and is slightly on the warmer side of the grey spectrum, then I recommend giving Diamine Silver Fox a try.

Inktober 2023 Day 5: Teal Rhino

I like inks that are on the teal/turquoise range so I almost always have a pen inked up with something in that shade (I currently have three – this Robert Oster Peppermint, Robert Oster Fire and Ice and a Graf von Faber Castell Turquoise). I sketched this white rhino without considering the background — which was just plain rock face, and so something that I should have changed up.

The pen body is from Woodshed Pens, and the nib is a Franklin Christoph fine. I like this combination, as it allows some sheen and shading to appear and yet is still relatively quick drying.

Can you guess what the next sketch will be?

Writing at Large

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