Sketching from the Window

Today I did a monochrome tree sketch in acrylic, using the 14x22" spread provided by my Stillman & Birn 11x14" Alpha sketchbook. While I feel I could have worked on this much longer, I met my goals with it and also ran out of time. Sometimes I need to remind myself that I don't have to treat a sketch as if it's a finished painting! I have so many "sketches" in my books that I later wished I'd done on canvas or a piece of paper not bound into a book.

I use the Golden Heavy Body Neutral Gray acrylics when I do these. I keep them in a plastic container that has a waterproof seal. They last for years this way. I just add more paint as I run low. Having the values premixed means I don't need a palette, and I also don't need to spend time mixing.  I can just dip in and paint. The heavy bodied paints dry so fast that I can close the sketchbook pretty soon after I finish. The book is clipped to an 18x24" board, so it stays open easily. I rest the top on the window sill and the bottom on my lap as I paint. It's a very comfortable way to work if you have a really deep window ledge!

I don't do any pencil drawing when I work this way. I sketch in a few lines with light, diluted paint --- just enough to know where my basic forms will lie. Then I start blocking in the large shapes, initially working back to front, and then back and forth pushing layers and adding details as needed. I'll likely do some journaling on the left side of the page that I left blank. The S&B Alpha paper is so strong that there is no problem with painting acrylics on both sides of a page.

Expansion of the Hudson River School Art Trail

8.5x11" across a two page spread of a Stillman & Birn Alpha Hardbound sketchbook

Platinum Black Carbon Ink and Watercolor

Image can be clicked to enlarge

On June 2, the official announcement was made about the expansion of the Hudson River School Art Trail to include many new sites. Kevin Avery, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gave a wonderful lecture at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site about these official Art Trail locations as well as other spots where the Hudson River School Artists did some of their most famous work and their plein air studies. (Of course I couldn't resist sketching during the lecture.) Click here to read more about the Hudson River School Art Trail. You can download maps and information on the website.

Just Doodling

Just Doodling, 8.5x11" (across the spread)

with a 2.4mm Pilot Parallel fountain pen

in a Stillman & Birn Alpha Hardbound book, 5.5x8.5"

Sometimes I really like to draw nothing at all. Drawing nothing is especially fun with a fountain pen, total exhaustion, and the TV on. Mindless mark-making is one of my favorite ways to relax at night when I'm too tired to do anything else! I'm wishing I'd used waterproof ink so that I could go back with red transparent watercolor and color in the boxes for the DOODLING letters. Too late now!

Waiting and Sketching at White Plains Airport

8.5x11" across a two page spread in a Stillman & Birn Alpha 5.5x8.5" Hardbound book

Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses ink in a Sheaffer 100 fountain pen

Ink blended with a waterbrush, then transparent watercolor added

It's times like this when I'm especially grateful to be an artist. You could leave me alone with a sketchbook and some art supplies and a few apples, and I'd be fine for days! The rest of the passengers didn't share my enthusiasm for a bit of extra sketching time though.

White Plains Airport is actually a pretty fun place to sketch, with large model aircraft hanging overhead in the tall space. The last time I flew out of here, the flight was cancelled, so I considered myself lucky that the plane was just delayed this time around. The trip itself was so busy that I didn't get an opportunity to sketch again until I returned home.

Noodler's Eternal Inks Lightfast Testing Preliminary Report

Brian Goulet of the Goulet Pen Company contacted me regarding some lightfastness testing I've been doing on a number of inks. So far I've tested 39 fountain pen inks. (If you haven't seen those results, you can click here and then keep scrolling down to see them all.) Whether or not lightfastness is an important issue is a decision you need to make for yourself, and your particular applications. Having the information available is always a good thing, and it gives us one more factor to consider when choosing an ink for a specific job.

In the interest of providing information to his customers, Brian suggested a collaborative venture to test all of the Noodler's Eternal inks, and have those results available on Inknouveau. Although some of my previous testing did include some of these inks, having them all done together at the same time, and available both there on Brian's site, and here on my blog, will be a good resource for those times when some UV resistance is important. The line of Noodler's Eternal Inks that we are testing includes the following:

• Noodler's Bad Black Moccasin
• Noodler's Black
• Noodler's Blackerase Waterase
• Noodler's El Lawrence
• Noodler's Heart of Darkness
• Noodler's Polar Black
• Noodler's X-Feather
• Noodler's Lexington Gray
• Noodler's Whiteness of the Whale
• Noodler's Blue Ghost
• Noodler's Bad Belted Kingfisher
• Noodler's Bad Blue Heron
• Noodler's Luxury Blue
• Noodler's Periwinkle
• Noodler's Polar Blue
• Noodler's Bad Green Gator
• Noodler's Hunter Green
• Noodler's Polar Green
• Noodler's Dostoyevsky
• Noodler's Year of the Golden Pig
• Noodler's Empire Red
• Noodler's Fox
• Noodler's Rachmaninoff
• Noodler's Socrates
• Noodler's Tchaikovsky
• Noodler's Kung Te-Cheng
• Noodler's La Reine Mauve
• Noodler's Mata Hari's Cordial
• Noodler's Pasternak
• Noodler's #41 Brown (2012)
• Noodler's Polar Brown
• Noodler's Whaleman's Sepia

I selected a Stillman & Birn Alpha 7x10" Wirebound book as my paper to do the tests. It's nicely sized, acid free, archival, heavy weight, doesn't have too much tooth, and is a clean bright white. Brian sent the 32 ink samples to me, and I got busy making swabs, crosshatches and washes to test in my studio window.

The ink samples were sorted by color group according to where Brian placed them in the Goulet Swab Shop, then by alphabetical order within that group. The swabs were done with Q-tips --- twice across on the top swab, and once across on the lower swab. All writing was done with a glass dip pen (including the crosshatched sections), which was washed and dried between samples. Artists who use fountain pens are often interested in knowing how much an ink's lines will wash with a water-filled brush after the ink is dry, so I washed a portion of the crosshatched sections with a wet brush. That also spread the ink thinner, providing additional information as the UV light interacts with the ink. Here are the prepared pages. You can click on any image for a larger, clearer version:

Black, Gray, White, Clear (Blue Ghost):

  

(My apologies for some ghosting on a couple of these images, due to the next page showing through a bit. I didn't realize that was happening until I was adjusting the images, and it's not too relevant at this stage in the process.)

Blues:

 

Greens, Turquoise, Yellow:

Red, Pink, Magenta:

Purples:

Browns:

The pages were then cut down the centers vertically, so that the name of the ink and half of each swatch is on each side. The right sides of the pages were placed in my south-facing studio window. The left sides will remain in the closed, wirebound book, where they will be in total darkness. Here they are, all set to go:

Most fountain pen inks are more fugitive than you'd think. That may not matter if whatever you write will not be exposed to UV light in its application, but it is certainly a reason to keep all of your inks stored in darkness.  Even colors in artists' paints that fade very quickly, like genuine alizarin crimson, take many times longer to show signs of change than fountain pen inks. Some inks start fading in just a matter of days. Others take six months or more.

I actually did this almost a month ago, so I will be posting preliminary results in about a week. That will give you an idea of which inks fade the fastest. I can tell you that a lot of them already have changed. So, stay tuned, especially if your favorite ink is on that list!

Part V of Stillman and Birn Alpha Review --- Working on the White Paper

Early on in my Stillman & Birn Alpha review series, many viewers were asking, "What if I only work on white paper?" I am hoping that this installment of the review will be helpful to those of you who are wondering about the Alpha paper's performance with wet and dry media directly on the white paper, with no toning or other preparation of the surface. (If you have not seen the previous installments of this review series, click here to go to Part I. Each post will link you to the next post in the series.)

To help you see the differences in the various Stillman and Birn papers with dry media, I cut a strip of each type of their paper, made some swatches on them with Prismacolor Black colored pencil, Wolff's 6B Carbon Pencil, and brown ink (drawn with a fountain pen), and ink and wash, and glued them into my Alpha book. You can click the image below to get an up-close view.

My assessment is that for dry media like colored pencil, the S&B Epsilon book yields the greatest value range and smoothness of application. It's a plate smooth paper, so the pencils make fuller contact with the paper. The Alpha and Gamma papers, which have a little more tooth to them, don't cover quite as fully, but still perform well. The Beta and Delta books show the most white in the swatches, since it's even more difficult than the Alpha to get into the tooth of the paper. Those uncovered areas (which I refer to as pinholes) reflect light, which translates as not being as dark a swatch. I did a colored pencil sketch on the Epsilon paper a few months ago, and was very impressed by that paper. The Prismacolor pencils loved the Epsilon surface, and my fountain pen glided across the paper like an ice skater. The Alpha actually does well with dry media, just not quite as well as the Epsilon, in my opinion.

You can see in the pen swatches above that all of the papers took a Medium nib fountain pen just fine, and did a fine job with the wash too, though there is a difference in the feel when using fountain pens with less tooth vs. more tooth. I've been using fountain pens a lot on the Alpha paper and it's great for both pen and wash and pen alone. I have never encountered bleed-through with any of my fountain pen inks.

Below is a watercolor and ink sketch that I did across a two page spread of an 8.5x11" Stillman & Birn Alpha Hardbound book. I have been very pleased with the brilliance of the watercolor on the Alpha paper. The paper is sized internally and externally, so the paint sits nicely on the surface. The vellum surface, as you can see here, does not present a problem for pens.

There is some very minimal buckling of the paper with the watercolor. It would bother me in a painting that I'm going to mat and frame, but in a sketchbook I kind of like it. It gives the paper character!

I turned the page of the sketch above and photographed the top of the reverse side of  the page that has most of the writing on it. If you look at the image below, you'll see that there is a very slight ghosting of the watercolor border, page title and text. Initially, I thought this would really bother me. But in practice, it does not. Once I work on the reverse side, I only notice it if I'm looking for it. However, it does show in photos. When you photograph or scan your work, you might encounter something like this (below) which is visible along with your image on that page.

There may be times when this is an important factor, and other times when it doesn't matter. My suggestion is to skip a page when you encounter a situation where it matters. This can either be done by sketching only on the right hand sides, (skipping each left side), or sketching across every other two page spread, leaving the back sides blank. All of the ink samples in this post were written back to back on the paper, and you can see that even with these ink tests, the opacity of the paper was not a problem!

All in all, the S&B Alpha Hardbound book impressed me. I threw a lot of different media at this book, turned pages into envelopes, removed the center spreads of the signatures, used multiple layers of acrylics, pastel ground, pastels, Cretacolor leads, inks, watercolor, gouache and pencil. The binding held together nice and tight, and I didn't find one situation where I couldn't "follow the paint" and do what I wanted to do. I would highly recommend this as a multi media book. Even though officially the book is good for "dry media and light washes," I was able to do much more with it without difficulty.

Driving Through the Garden State

I had some journaling templates tucked into my messenger bag on the way home from Maryland. By the time I finished my Maryland Montage, we'd crossed into New Jersey, and I wanted to do something different for the next page spread. I used the templates as stencils for the rectangular shapes -- about the only way to draw straight lines in a moving car! Then I did these little scene captures in ink and watercolor while driving through the state. The page background color and border had been previously painted with diluted acrylic.

This sketchbook is now finished! I have a couple of test pages that I haven't shown yet, but I'll be showing those soon, along with a couple of wrap-up review segments about this Stillman & Birn Alpha hardbound sketchbook.

Maryland Montage --- Sketching in a Moving Vehicle

Stillman & Birn Alpha 5.5x8.5" hardbound sketchbook

Noodler's Kung Te-Cheng ink in a 0.3 (fine) Platinum Preppy fountain pen

Private Reserve Sepia ink in a 1.5mm Pilot Parallel calligraphy pen

Noodler's Golden Brown ink in a Pilot Plumix italic pen

Brown Sharpie Calligraphy pen

Winsor Newton, Daniel Smith, Holbein and Schmincke watercolors

Background page toning done previously with diluted acrylic

I've done montage formats like this before in open studio life drawing, at the zoo, and other times when I was just grabbing images on the go. But this is the first time I did it in a moving car. (At least I wasn't driving!) We were on our way home from our niece's wedding in Maryland. With just two page spreads left to finish this sketchbook, I couldn't resist the temptation. It was quite an experience. I learned two important things:

1. Drawing straight lines, in a moving vehicle at a high rate of speed with potholes and curves, is not going to happen.
2. If you think you don't get carsick, try sketching for awhile!

Initially, I was having so much fun that all I could think about was, "Why didn't I try this sooner?" I even did another two page spread after this one, since one remaining page spread was even harder to resist than when there were two left.. By then my stomach was in knots and I was definitely done for the day. I think the next time I sketch in a car, it will be parked!

Wedding Flowers

My first big event of 2012 was my niece's wedding! She got married on New Year's Day, so we spent a few days in Maryland to take in the festivities. The table bouquets were white hydrangeas, assorted yellow flowers, and peacock feathers. I got to take one of them back to the hotel with me and sketched it that night during the first half of the Giant game, while the guys cheered on our home team. Even I gave in and watched the second half. Some things are a requirement!

The feathers had so much sheen to them that after I finished painting, I mixed up some of the Schmincke dry gold gouache and added some sparkle to them. Unfortunately, that isn't visible on the photo. However, you can see the coppery shimmer on the border from the iridescent acrylics that I used to prepare the page ground and border.

Inks used: Private Reserve Copper Burst and Private Reserve Sepia
Pens: Pilot Parallel 1.1mm, Pilot Petite
Winsor Newton and Daniel Smith watercolors
Winsor Newton, Schmincke and Holbein gouache
Pages prepared in advance using Golden Fluid and Golden Fluid Iridescent acrylics, and F&W Acrylic Inks
Painted across a two page spread in a 5.5x8.5" Stillman and Birn Hardcover Alpha sketchbook

Breaking in Your Stillman and Birn Alpha, Gamma or Epsilon Hardbound Sketchbook So It Lies Flat

For all of you kindred spirits who share my infatuation with Stillman & Birn Alpha, Gamma or Epsilon  hardbound sketchbooks, I have some great information to share with you! I was talking on the phone last week with Stillman and Birn co-owner Michael Kalman, and he told me that their hardbound books have been designed to open completely flat, and they have a flexible binding! Yep, that's right!

In order to achieve this, you have to break in the book before you use it by opening to the center of the book and bending the pages and covers back 360 degrees so they touch. Then go through the book and do that throughout the book, gently bending the pages and covers back.  I know you're thinking the whole book will fall apart. That's what I thought, and I would never in a million years have done it if he hadn't told me. But when I got off the phone with him, I went straight to the new S&B sketchbook I was about to start, and did exactly what he said. My husband walked in and was horrified --- he thought I was destroying the book until I explained it to him.

After bending the pages and covers gently all the way back from the middle of the book, I did the same thing from the center of each signature (where the stitching is). Then I again started from the middle, working toward the front, opening every page spread that way; then I did the same from the middle toward the back. Don't use every ounce of brute strength that you have, because if you try hard enough to pull the book apart, you will probably be able to do that!  When I was finished going through the whole book twice like that, every single page spread laid down flat. No deep gutters to cross! It was a miracle. I am sooooo excited about this! It works. Try it.

The reason why you want to do this before working in an S&B book is because if you paint across the two page spreads like I do, adding that flexibility to the binding reveals more of the white paper in the gutter area. If I were to do it to my almost-completed Alpha book, I'd have a white vertical stripe down the center of nearly every painting I've done in that book. I have noticed while working through the book that as it has broken in a little bit by itself, some of that white in the middle has been revealed on some of the page spreads. Not only will the books lie much flatter by breaking them in ahead of time, but it will also stop those white center areas from appearing later on as the binding gives with use.

The S&B hardbound books apparently have a triple binding process that involves three different types of adhesion. It is this triple process that enables them to undergo bending the binding and page spreads back that way without damage to the spine, and keeping all the pages intact. This is such wonderful news for those of us who work across the two-page spreads; I had to share!

Butterfly Fish, Flame Angel, and Painted Glass Fish --- and happy new year!

Watercolor on acrylic-prepared surface in my 5.5x8.5" 

Stillman & Birn Alpha hardbound book.

Happy New Year to all my visitors. I hope that 2012 brings you all joy, good health, prosperity, and let's not forget.....creativity. Of course I'm also wishing for world peace and tolerance, the end of famine and natural disasters, health care for all, and a better economy!

This was my last sketch of the day at Animal Kingdom. When I do these on location, I leave the writing for after I get home. That enables me to get as many sketches done on location as I can, without being slowed down by the journaling part of it. Sometimes it takes me a few days to get that done and get the images photographed, adjusted, and loaded up here.

The sign on the tank identified that yellow and white fish as a Spotted Butterfly, but when I looked online yesterday, the "Spotted Butterfly Fish" I saw didn't look anything like this one! So, I'm not quite sure what this one is, but he does look like some kind of Butterfly fish. The little glass fish were highly florescent --- gorgeous little creatures! They weren't in the same tank, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity to sketch them, so I put them in here.

Discus Fish at Animal Kingdom

Noodler's Apache Sunset ink, Private Reserve Naples Blue ink, watercolor

in a Stillman & Birn Alpha hardbound sketchbook.

Discus fish are among the most beautiful of the freshwater species. They had some wonderful specimens at Animal Kingdom. They must be very shy because no matter which one I was sketching, that one would become aware of the fact I was staring, and would try to find a place in the tank to hide. They come from the Brazilian Amazon River and often are caught live there and transported to pet stores. I was feeling like I  needed florescent paints to capture their colors! I pulled out the most brillian cyans I had on hand --- Private Reserve Naples Blue ink and Winsor Blue watercolor.

Macaw and Sun Conures at Animal Kingdom --- and a claw!

Inks, watercolor, gouache and Cretacolor leads over an acrylic-toned

background and border in my 5.5x8.5" Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbook.

I went sketching at the Animal Kingdom store in Brewster the other day. These sketches were done in the little Rain Forest room, where the birds can be safely out of their cages and entertain visitors like me! The Macaw was a riot. The entire time, he followed me around, trying to get close enough to climb up on my shoulder. He'd reach out his claw and say, "Up, up?" It was very difficult to get a sketch of him done when he kept doing things like this:

Is that the cutest bird you ever saw? I'd back up to continue my profile sketch, and he'd follow me over to my new location, foot outstretched...."Up, up?" So I eventually had to abandon that sketch in favor of birds who were more willing to ignore me!

On the other side of the rain forest were three Sun Conures that they call Sammie and the Cruisers. (I only painted two of them.) They are very bonded to one another, and reminded me so much of the colorful Jenday Conures I had, Lulu and Lucy, who I used to refer to as "Double Trouble"!

I had enough space left for one more thing on the page, and decided to do a monochrome study of an African Grey's claw as he balanced on one foot, the other held up against his body. Birds do have interesting feet!

Shading Inks Testing, Reviews, and Selections

When I recently did this sketch and discovered the joys of Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses ink, I decided that I need to find more inks that give me that kind of variety in both color and value, otherwise known as inks with "shading". I started to revisit samples I'd acquired previously when I wasn't looking for that particular characteristic, and ordered a bunch of new samples to try too. I started testing them with three different dip pens: a glass pen, a Speedball B-5 nib, and a Brause 2mm italic calligraphy nib. I also drew a crosshatched section on each sample with each nib, and once dry, went back and brushed it with a water-filled brush to see how much the ink would (or wouldn't) wash, the color of the wash, and if it would leave enough of the lines behind to hold onto my drawing in sketches. I should have included Black Swan in Australian Roses in the tests just so I'd have the samples to show, but since I already had a bottle of it and already knew I loved it, I didn't have to prove that one to myself!

The fourteen inks tested here are:

• Noodler's Golden Brown
• Noodler's Apache Sunset
• Private Reserve Orange Crush
• Private Reserve Shoreline Gold
• Noodler's Habanero
• Noodler's Cayenne
• Noodler's Antietum
• Caran d'Ache Sunset
• Private Reserve Blue Suede
• Private Reserve Naples Blue
• Private Reserve Tropical Blue
• Private Reserve Sepia
• Private Reserve Copper Burst
• Rohrer & Klingner Alt Goldgrun (misspelled in my test --- sorry!)

These tests were done in a 5.5x8.5" Stillman & Birn Alpha Hardbound sketchbook. It is an archival, acid-free paper, 100 lb (150 gsm), internally sized and surface sized, with a vellum surface. I selected that paper because it is one I use often for my art journals, so it was most important for me to know how the inks would perform on that particular paper. You might get completely different results with different paper, different pens, and even a different amount of pressure or speed in your writing. In other words, your mileage may vary!

I tried to get the color as good as I could in the images, but there was so much color and light bouncing around the white pages and light filters that I could never even get both sides of the page to light up the same way. So, my apologies for my poor photography skills, but I still think you can get a pretty good idea of what these look like. Each image can be clicked to enlarge it.

 

I have to say that I was thrilled with almost all of these. A couple of notes from these samples:

• Noodler's Golden Brown and Private Reserve Sepia are both great inks with wonderful shading. They are not exactly the same, but they are certainly in the same color family. You probably will want to choose between the two of them. Golden Brown is more yellow, and Sepia is a yellowish raw sienna color (sort of like Winsor Newton Raw Sienna, if you're familiar with it).
• Private Reserve Copper Burst did not shade for me. However, it is such a fabulous color that I plan to get a bottle to use with watercolor. Most browns veer to yellow, orange or red when dissolved with a wet brush. This one does not. It holds its color, which is neutral enough to be of great use to me. Also, in writing with it, it has a lovely shimmer. Bonus!
• Noodler's Antietum was another ink that didn't provide much shading, but is such an interesting and highly saturated color that I think there is a bottle of it in my future.
• Rohrer and Klingner Alt Goldgrun seemed to shade well in these very wet dip pens, so it was one of the samples I inked up in a fountain pen. But in an 0.5 Preppy, the result was highly disappointing, and much too light to be useful to me for drawing purposes. So, I am still looking for a good green with shading....

I inked up a vintage Eversharp Symphony piston-fill Flex pen with a Fine nib with the Noodler's Golden Brown, and one with a Broad nib with the Private Reserve Suede Blue, and quickly dashed off a couple of pages of quotes to see how they'd look with these pens. Surprisingly, the Golden Brown didn't shade in that particular pen. (You'll have to click this one to get a sharper image if you want to see it better.)

I inked up a bunch of pens with these and other favorites from the samples, to see how they'd perform in various fountain pens. The ones I felt worthy of putting into fountain pens were:

• Noodler's Apache Sunset
• Noodler's Cayenne
• Caran d'Ache Sunset
• Noodler's Golden Brown
• Private Reserve Sepia
• Private Reserve Naples Blue
• Iroshizuki Kon-Peki (not shown in the test samples above)
• Private Reserve Tropical Blue
• Noodler's Black Swan n Australian Roses (not shown in samples above)
• Private Reserve Blue Suede

If you click the images below, they will enlarge so that you can read about my impressions and what pens I used. (In posting these photos, I can see that the image below isn't as clear as I thought it would be, so I will type out the handwritten text when I get back later today or tonight, to make it easier to read.)

Special mention should go to two wonderful shading inks that I did not put into fountain pens only because there was so much similarity in this color range. They are

• Private Reserve Orange Crush and 
• Noodler's Habanero.

They are both highly saturated inks with orange-yellow-red components that wash well and provide a lot of value and color variation.

I hope this write-up was helpful to those of you who share my current quest for inks that provide shading. I'll be doing some lightfastness testing of these inks too, and will have some preliminary results to share in another month or so. Hopefully there will also be some artwork to post with these new inks!

Studio Assistant

As I've been working my way through this Stillman & Birn Alpha journal, and doing my multi-part review, many people have asked me, "What if I work on the white paper instead of pages prepared with a colored ground? How will the paper perform then?" Of course with a sketchbook, that's how most folks work! So I saved several page spreads of plain paper toward the back of the book, and will write something up about working on the plain paper in a couple of days.

I've been wanting a studio assistant for a long time! This particular one doesn't do much, but she can manage to hold onto my wonderful TWSBI ROC 100,  which is more than I can do sometimes. This sketch was done across a two page spread using a 6mm Pilot Parallel with blue ink. I've used this pen often for title lettering, but have never tried sketching with it. It has a very wide, stiff nib, so unless the paper is absolutely, perfectly flat, the pen skips spots. That means it doesn't write evenly in a sketchbook. I thought that might make it interesting for sketching though. The pen is designed to give that very wide 6mm line on one end, and very thin line about 0.3-0.5mm when used on its side. I'm not quite sure yet how I feel about the result, but I think it's worthy of further experimentation. I have these pens in all the other sizes too, which I've found much more useful so far than this 6mm one, yet there's something I really like about the way this pen lays down the lines.

My initial intent was to leave the entire sketch blue, coloring in only the TWSBI pen with red and purple. (It's currently filled with purple ink.) But then I thought adding the red to the cloth all the objects were resting on would give the blue a bit more pop and add another dimension to the sketch. I used Winsor Newton Cadmium Red and Permanent Rose watercolor. It wasn't necessarily a bad idea to do that, but it did completely change the focal point away from my studio assistant holding the pen! So I decided that since I did that, I may as well mix up a little of that Schmincke bottle of gold gouache powder, and color the bottle and a bit on the red beside it. Sometimes it's better to stick with the original plan, and sometimes it's better to let the painting lead you to a different idea. I'm not sure which one this was!

Merry Christmas from the Sweet Shop

Ink and watercolor in my 5.5x8.5" Stillman & Birn Alpha sketchbook. Image can be clicked to enlarge.

Merry Christmas to all my viewers! Wishing you all a joyous holiday.

Lunch Break

(Click image for a larger, clearer view.)

When my sketching group goes to Adams, we all meet in the cafe area for lunch at noon. It's a golden opportunity to catch some quick gesture sketches of customers at a nearby register, or seated in the cafe. I sketched them in with Noodler's Luxury Blue ink in a Pilot Plumix italic pen, and used the same ink for the smaller writing on the page. (The large title is watercolor, painted with a brush.) This ink washes just a tiny bit with a water-filled brush, and I supplemented that with watercolor over the top of the ink sketch.

People often ask how I select my colors for a given scene. Often my choices are inspired by one of the borders or backgrounds that I pre-painted in my book. Other times I know what colors I want to use when I look at the scene, and I look for a painted page spread that will accommodate those colors. For this scene, I really wanted a white page to sketch on. Any border colors would have worked as long as I had the white center; I'd just sketch with the colors present in the border. But I have to confess, I was really happy to come to this blue border and be able to put the Luxury Blue ink to good use! It's become one of my favorites.

Review of Schmincke Reichgold Dry Gouache --- Glittery Glimmery Glam!

(Image is clickable if you'd like to see it larger and sharper.)

When I got home from Adams the other day after doing this sketch, I did the writing with the same pens and inks that I used on the sketch posted yesterday. But it seemed a little stark to me. It needed just a touch of something glittery for some extra holiday cheer. I was going to add some gold touches with the Krylon 18K Gold Leafing Pen, but then I got another idea...

A few weeks ago, I was in the Jerrys Artarama store in Norwalk, and I stumbled upon a bottle of Schmincke Reichgold Dry Gouache. It's metallic gold with a gouache binder in powdered form that you mix up as needed. I had to try it! It's been sitting in my studio ever since. I pulled it out and using a small palette knife, set some out on a piece of glass. I took a couple of drops of water and mixed it up with the palette knife on the glass surface, then painted some bits onto the wreath. I know you might only be able to make out a few dabs of it on the wreath; it's hard to see in photos, just like the iridescent paint, but I absolutely love this stuff! I wish you could all see it in person. It mixes up very easily and has a more textural look to it than the pen. When you mix it, you can understand why it is sold in a dry, powdered form. The metal particles separate easily from the water and binder once it's mixed up, so liquifying it as needed is definitely the way to go with this product.

Here's what the bottle and powder look like:

The photo makes the bottle look huge, but it's only 20ml. Very small. The mix remains soluble in water. I left  some to dry on the glass, then went back with a wet brush and it sprang right back to life. The small quantity I'd put out was just begging to be all used up and it reconstituted so easily that I went ahead and added it to some other sketches too. Some does come off after it's dry if you rub a finger across a painted area, so it doesn't set as permanently as the gold pen or gold acrylic paint.

The fact that the gold gouache remains soluble is a big factor, because that means it won't destroy my brush if I'm out on location and can't wash the brush right away. Although the gold leafing pen is easier to carry around and use, the gouache has some advantages. I can use more water and less powder to add a little shimmer to a colored area, or  instead paint something solid gold with very little dilution of the product. This makes it more versatile in its application. Apparently it can also be mixed into paints, though I haven't tried that...yet! 

Returning to Adams Fairacre Farms

I had so much fun the last time I sketched at the new Adams Fairacre Farms in Wappinger that I couldn't wait to get back there for Round 2. They must have sold a huge number of poinsettia plants, because the huge tree of them that I sketched last time was gone!

I started out the morning in their greenhouse again, sketching with Noodler's Sequoia ink and watercolors in a fine-nib fountain pen, in my Stillman & Birn Alpha 5.5x8.5" hardbound book. Because of the fairly intense color of the prepared background, I ended up switching to gouache to finish off the sketch. I always make sure to have gouache with me for emergencies like this. Since I like to travel light, I made a tiny gouache kit from a mini Altoids container and Sculpey clay.

 The holes in the clay were made with the back of a pencil. (That and the quarter should give you an idea of how tiny this is!) I was able to make 15 holes for colors. Since the Altoids tin is metal, I baked the whole thing in the oven, Sculpey, tin and all. Once it was cool, I coated the inside with a few coats of Golden GAC 100 to seal it. I'm not sure if that step was necessary or not, but since I had it on hand, I went ahead and did it. I've been using it for several months now, and it's really come in handy on a number of occasions.

The smaller text on the page was written with a 1:1 dilution of the Sequoia ink in a different, broad-nibbed pen. (A Kaweco Sport) Sometimes it just seems too saturated to me for writing, and I happen to like the more olive-like green I get when I dilute it. You can see the difference in the value and color between that green text, and the thinner, darker green of the lines for the hanging baskets of plants. The page title was written with a 2.4mm Pilot Parallel, using a red Pilot ink cartridge. Having a red calligraphy pen all set to go has turned out to be a good thing during the holiday season!

The Life of an Amaryllis Part I

You can click the image for a larger, clearer view.

A few weeks ago, I prepared two, two-page spreads with pastel ground. I just wanted to experiment with the Golden Acrylic Ground for Pastels to see what it was like. I used one for a pastel sketch that is still evolving, and I thought I'd use Wolff's Carbon Pencils for this second one. What I really like about the Wolff's pencils is that:

1. they give beautiful, rich darks, and
2. they wash with a wet brush.

This means I can play both wet and dry, and layer to my heart's content. They are a blend of graphite and charcoal that merges the smoothness of graphite with the depth of charcoal. I used only a 6B here, drawing first, then washing a bit. I went back and forth that way, then dove in for the kill with the dark accents. I should have stopped there. But I liked the rich darks so much that I started doing more and more, and well, you know how that goes. It passed that delicious al dente stage and became a bit overcooked.

Pastel ground is not friendly to fountain pens. They write fine on it, but the ground has a fine texture to it that will destroy nibs, so I did the writing with a Pilot Plumix on Borden & Riley 108 lb. Pen and Ink paper, and glued it onto the adjacent page. The purple writing was a Sharpie felt tip calligraphy pen, so I really didn't care what would happen to that one! I used that directly on the pastel ground.

I'm excited about this amaryllis series! It will be fun to explore the changes and have the chance to observe it more closely as I sketch, and it gives me something interesting to draw inside from life, for those times when I can't get out on location. I really hate working from photos.