Look! My sketchbook has stuff in it!
I've been thinking about my sketchbook in terms of "how" instead of "what": I pick a medium or color palette I want to experiment with or improve at and dedicate the entire spread to that. It's helped me avoid succumbing to perfectionism-induced decision paralysis because I just think about cool stuff I want to try instead of getting stuck on making a pretty picture.
Drawings using one ink and water. Left: A coffee cup drawn with Diamine Pick Me Up, a brown ink, and Diamine Safari, an olive green ink, used to draw its own bottle. Right: A tree drawn with Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrün, another olive green ink.
The vast majority of fountain pen ink is water-soluble, so I figured you'd be able to use it like watercolor to some extent. I did the coffee entirely by drawing with a pen and blending with water. You can get a surprisingly good wash that way, so that gives me a fun and space-conscious alternative to painting when I'm out! I used a brush and dip pen with the ink on the other two drawings in an attempt to push the pigments more. The Safari ink bottle turned out, but the ink itself is pretty boring, so I didn't get the results I was hoping for. Alt-Goldgrün has significantly more interesting pigment separation going on. I used it wet-on-wet in the leaves by blobbing some water on the page and following up with the ink. (It separates out into green, yellow, and blue!)
I tried to map out negative space beforehand but had to touch up some spots with white gouache. It's not as clean, but I lived!
A painting of a narrow street in Sevilla using burnt sienna and ultramarine blue watercolors. The buildings were outlined in black pen after the paint dried.
Burnt sienna and ultramarine is the palette of all time. I've wanted to use it for a while. It forces you to plot colors on a warm-cool spectrum so you don't get bogged down in color matching. I did the lines after the paint out of necessity since I was using water-soluble ink, but I actually liked doing things backwards because I could improvise with the paint and have the lines follow through later.
This was a first for a lot of things: first time using this palette, first time trying to take watercolors seriously, and first time urban sketching. And it doesn't look awful!
(A bit of pink paint flaked onto the page at some point. You can see it on a building to the right. It adds character.)
Gouache paintings using the Zorn palette (Yellow ochre, cadmium red, black, and white). Left: Hands; one with light skin and the other with dark skin. Right: Landscape paintings; one of aspens and the other of red rocks.
This is my spread for my Zorn palette experimentation, which you can read about at the Zorn palette post.
Gouache paintings using dried gouache cakes. Left: A color mixing chart. Right: Paintings of a butterfly and a potted plant using vibrant colors.
These paintings were shown in the mint tin gouache palette post. Dried gouache behaves differently from fresh tube paint, so I made the color chart to get a feel for how the paints would behave after being mixed. I also did a few tests with layering and blending.
I admittedly haven't used the pans as much as I thought I would — they're just not as satisfying as fresh paint for me! But the way they layer is really interesting, so I'm going to keep them around and see how far I can push them.