Friday, March 1, 2013

When a Book is Not a Sketchbook

Recently I've been experimenting with different kinds of sketchbooks...some of them not really designed to be a sketchbook at all. One of these books is the 'Rite in the Rain' waterproof notebook. I was inspired by Roz Stendahl's 2009 fake journal in which she did some exquisite bird drawings in an Alvin Field Notebook, so I went to my local survey shop and picked up the closest thing I could find, the 'Rite in the Rain'. These pages are so waxy that my first attempts to paint on them were a disaster. The paint just beaded up on the surface and refused to dry. Once I added a drop of dish detergent to my water they did spread but the result was less than interesting. After talking to Roz she suggested I really layer on the paint in a thick, inky consistency and that seemed to work. The birds below were done as a test to see how different things would work in the book. The bird on the left was done with Derwent Inktense pencils which are really fun to work with on this super smooth paper. The washes were not quite as good as the bird on the right which was done with a Pitt Brush Pen, heavily loaded pigment of Daniel Smith Watercolor, some white gouache and random scratching with the tip of a bamboo dip pen. It's been a lot of fun working in this book and I plan to try to find one of the Alvin books to try out.

Click to enlarge

1 comment:

Green Morning said...

It sounds like you're trying out different styles of journal keeping and different types of sketchbooks for the International Fake Journal Month! April is just around the corner :)