Tag: watercolour

Sketchbook Design: My Tools

I’ve enrolled into Liz Steel’s Sketchbook Design online course, as I like the way Liz designs her notebook pages and I’ve taken an Urban Sketchers workshop (in Porto, 2018) which was excellent. Liz sent the first intro videos to the course to her newsletter subscribers, and so I decided to pick a sketchbook for the course (which starts on January 4th) and draw the tools that I plan on using in it.

The sketchbook that I chose is a Stillman and Birn Beta softcover A5 sketchbook, because it has watercolour friendly paper and I wanted to try that paper out. Here’s a sketch of my tools done with a Lamy Safari Petrol fine nib fountain pen and a Lamy Safari Dark Lilac medium nib fountain pen, both with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black.

I got carried away with the lines when drawing my palette, so I decided to roll with it and just use it to write down the paint details.

Here it is after applying watercolour:

It’s not perfect, but I like the way this page looks.

Here’s my Winsor & Newton Travel Watercolour box, filled with Schminke watercolours (some of them on their second or third refill from the tube). I love this paint box so much that I used my previous one until it fell to pieces. This is my new one, and it’s holding up well so far.

The fountain pens that I’ll be using: Lamy Safari Petrol F nib with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black, Lamy Safari Dark Lilac M nib with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black, Lamy Safari Charcoal EF nib with J. Herbin Bleu Pevench, Sailor Fude MF pen with Noodler’s Lexington Grey (Bulletproof ink).

My non fountain pens are my beloved Saedtler pigment liners in 0.3 and 0.7 and a Uni-ball Signo broad white.

The pencil I will use is a vintage Eagle Turquoise “Chemi Sealed” H drawing pencil. I just love everything about these pencils, and I really wish that they were still in production.

My brushes: a Raphael round travel brush, I’m not sure what size. There’s a good chance that I’ll replace it with a better round brush as the course progresses, as I’m not enamoured with it. The black brush in the middle is a Winsor & Newton Series 7 no 2 Kolinsky sable brush. The white and silver brush below is a Rosemary & Co R12 Sable/Nylon Dagger brush, and it’s a brush that I haven’t 100% mastered but that I’m growing to like with use.

That’s it for my tools at the moment. I’ll update this blog with my progress as the course takes place, and I’ll be sure to note if my tools change throughout.

Four Watercolour Tips

Four quick tips for those using watercolours:

  • Write the colour number on the pan with a Sharpie (or a similar) pen. Inevitably the sticker or stamp with the watercolour’s number will fade away or peel off and you’ll be left trying to guess what it was when it’s time to replace it. If you mix watercolours by different makers then also give an indication of the maker on the pan.
  • Replace unused paint with something else that you may actually use. This is important particularly if you’re working with a small portable palette. If you see a pan with paint that hasn’t got a dent in it, consider replacing it with something else that you may use. Ask yourself why it’s just sitting there (it’s too opaque and hard to mix? You don’t need it much because of the subjects you draw?), and replace it with something that will better fit your needs. Palettes evolve with time, and yours should evolve to better fit your needs and drawing goals.
  • Buy tubes of paint to refill well used paint pans. When your starting out and still building up your palette and skills, work with pre-filled half-pans (the small square pans of paint). After a while you’ll start to see a few colours that you use more heavily than others, and for those paints you can either go for full pans, or buy paint tubes and refill them, giving them some time to set. It’s much more economical, with the caveat that you need to look up the paint maker that you’re using to see if there’s any difference between the paint in the pans and the paint in tubes. I use Schminke Horadam and there is none, so I’ve been refilling my pans for a few years now.
  • Check transparency and staining before selecting a paint. This is particularly important if you plan on mixing paint or lifting paint (using a brush to remove paint from the paper while it’s still wet or flooding the paper to remove paint). Paint that is opaque will not mix well with other paints (you’ll get a muddy effect), and you need to be aware of it while drawing. Transparent paints may not be as vibrant as their opaque counterparts, but they work very well with others. Staining paints will stain your paper, leaving a shadow of themselves as you try to lift them. These are not bad things in and of themselves, these are just things that you need to be aware about before adding a paint to your palette.

Urban Sketchers Tel Aviv: Dubnov Garden

We haven’t had an Urban Sketchers sketchwalk in Tel Aviv since June due to Covid-19. We met today and drew, socially distanced and with masks, for three hours in Dubnov garden, which is not far from Rabin Square and is just behind the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

The first drawing, focusing on the strange rock sunken sculpture in the middle of the garden, was drawn on a Stillman and Birn Pocket Alpha, with a TWSBI ECO 1.1 stub filled with Rohrer and Klingner Emma SketchINK and Schminke watercolours.

The second drawing is a panorama of the architecture near the park, and it was drawn on a Moleskine Large Watercolour notebook, with the same materials and the drawing above.

My drawing challenge has allowed me to streamline my process and bring in much fewer art supplies to the sketchwalk without feeling that I’m missing out. It was also the first time I brought my Walkit sketchbag to a sketchcrawl and it worked very well. I’ll write a review of it later on, once I’ve finalized the kit I put in it.

30 Days of Drawing: Days 6-10

I decided not to take part in Inktober this year. Instead I’ll be drawing at least one page a day in my Stillman and Birn Pocket Alphas. You can see days 1-5 here.

I had some failures and some successes with my drawings this week. I did a very quick and not very accurate drawing of my gong fu table, and with that finished my first Stillman and Birn Pocket Alpha.

The green spot in the right corner is a nasturtium leaf test that I did for another drawing earlier in the sketchbook.

I’ll probably write a post about the Pocket Alpha, maybe later this week. In any case, the sketch above didn’t come out great and I considered not even investing in painting it, but then I figured out that while I learned from my mistakes in sketching the gaiwan proportions (I’m not using a pencil under drawing because I’m trying to speed up my process), I wouldn’t get a chance to improve my watercolour skills if I didn’t watercolour it. So the result was an OK watercolour, and another proof that paint can cover a multitude of sketching sins.

The next sketch took my two days, mostly because I was busy. It’s a “flowers of the urban desert” spread, and I created the top left sketch on day 2 and the rest on day 3. I’m trying to get myself used to composing pages, and this one will probably get some text added to it later.

We’ve just entered our second lockdown, and I got nostalgic to the office and to our little escapes to our excellent local coffee shop. Found a photo of this latte from one of my final pre-Covid visits there and decided to draw it.

This drawing, of the excellent Paul’s Café in Jaffa, took me the longest to draw, and that’s after I edited out a ton of details. It was fun to do and reminded me of better times. I hope that they pull through and I’ll be able to go back there someday soon.

30 Days of Drawing: Days 1-5

I decided not to take part in Inktober this year. Instead I’ll be drawing at least one page a day in my Stillman and Birn pocket Alphas. It happens that there are just a few pages left in my first pocket Alpha, the one I got gifted by Stillman and Birn as part of their sponsorship of Gabi Campanario’s Urban Sketches Porto 2018 symposium class. I use multiple sketchbooks at the same time, and finishing and starting a notebook is always the hardest part for me. So I decided to challenge myself to finish my old Stillman and Birn pocket Alpha and start on a new one, by challenging myself to draw at least a page a day for 30 days straight.

I will be batch uploading these 5 days at a time, so here’s what I drew on the 17th of September until today, the 21st of September:

Shana Tova!

Shana Tova! May the coming year be a thousand times better than the past one.

Vengeful Fortress Part 3: Rohrer and Klingner Lotte SketchINK Mini Review

Welcome back to Vengeful Fortress, a fantasy roleplaying game that I’m drawing in ink and watercolour (no pencil underdrawing, to save time) as I’m running it for my group of players. We’re now in Part 3, and here are Part 1and Part 2 (which also include a review of the sketchbook I’m using, the Stillman and Birn Epsilon).

As you can see, things are starting to heat up. I’m using a TWSBI Diamond 540 fountain pen with a fine nib, filled with Rohrer and Klingner SketchINK Lotte. SketchINK Lotte is a black pigmented and waterproof fountain pen ink. It’s not a saturated ink, and you can see the grey shading quite clearly here in the lettering and the line work. R&K SketchINK Lotte is also a hard starter, so while it does flow well enough when you get it primed up with a few preliminary scribbles, if you put the pen down for even a few minutes, you’re going to have to prime it again. It is, however, waterproof and relatively fast drying, which makes it worth my time using it. In case you’re wondering if “hard starting” is just an issue with this pen or this nib, I have tried R&K SketchINK Emma and Lotte in a Lamy Safari and a Super5 pen and they are hard starters in all cases. It seems to be a property of the ink, perhaps because it dries to relatively quickly, or because of the particular waterproof formula R&K are using here.

So know that you can trust the Rohrer and Klingner SketchINKs with your watercolours, and know that they’re great for when you’re in a rush and don’t want to wait for the ink to dry, but also have a bit of scrap paper for the first few seconds before you use them .