While many are counting spring flowers, Quebec City lags behind planet Earth as we still have lots of snow. I’m hopeful it will melt away ‘real soon’ and it was with that optimistic view that I decided to go outside and draw.
It was still too cold. It was windy and I had to stand up while drawing, something I’m not good at, but by standing against a wall, out of the wind, it wasn’t too bad. Here’s my first outdoor sketch of 2018.
We made a weekend trip to Montreal to visit our daughter, which meant that within a couple hours of arriving we were standing in Notebene, my favorite pen/paper/pencil store. I was there to talk to Carol about a pen and to pick up some Platinum Carbon Black cartridges.
It was to be a ‘no spend’ visit because I didn’t need much. But, you know, a guy’s got to look around and, you know, it’s hard to resist, you know, finding stuff I “needed.” Of course I “needed” a dozen Tombow Mono 2B pencils I found. Not too bad, though. We were twenty minutes into the visit and the pencils were all I “needed.”
Then it happened. My daughter handed me a notebook and said, “This feels so good.” It was an A6-size book that must have had a couple hundred pages in it, nice cream-colored blank, as in could be used as a sketchbook, pages. And she was right, it felt right. It was heavier than I like in a sketchbook but holding it made me feel like I had something important in my hands. I could tell my daughter wanted it badly. She did her best to argue that I shouldn’t buy it for her but her heart wasn’t really in it. By then, my wife was there and she wanted one too.
I now had nearly $60 worth of books in my hands and I was sort of wishing they had a third one for me. I say sort of because they also had a thinner version of the book that was just as elegant but much lighter and it suited my “needs” better than the thicker book. One of those ($14 CDN) ended up on the pile. And with smiles all around, my “no spend” day warmed up the credit card quite a bit.
So what is this sketchbook? It’s a Paperlarias Emilio Braga notebook with blank, cream-colored 90gsm paper. These notebooks are handmade and both sewn and glued together. They lay flat. The covers are cardboard covered with brown paper and reinforced with a fabric spine and corners. The blank page books come with a writing guide with lines on one side and a grid on the other.
Because the paper is only 90gsm it’s best used with dry media, or at most light washes as it will buckle if you add a lot of water. In the one drawing I’ve done, I did get some buckling but no bleedthrough or ghosting. I’m really happy with it; it feels so good in the hand. I just might have to get one of the thicker ones the next time I’m in Montreal.
It’s now 2018 and I’m hoping there will be fewer doctor and physio appointments this year. I’ve tried to doodle my way through the last few months of 2017, working on using my elbow and shoulder more and my wrists less. I draw small, though and find that transition to be tough sledding, particularly for drawing small-size curves that my wrist just won’t do.
Nevertheless, if I made any resolution for 2018 it was to get back to drawing. This morning I decided to draw a scene from a photo. My wrist was feeling “pretty good” which is my shorthand term for “it’s not locked up and doesn’t hurt constantly” and so I grabbed a Platinum Carbon pen and a 5×7 piece of Fabriano Artistico CP and tried to capture a photo I had of Quebec’s Finance Building. The pen isn’t flowing like it once did, probably because I’m being too careful about how I’m moving my hand, but I did produce a sketch and I share it with you here.
Hopefully things will improve as I get back into it. I sure hope so because Liz Steel’s new watercolour course starts January 10th and I hope to do a lot of fuzzy stick practice ‘real soon.’
I’m used to working with the subject in front of me. I rely upon it to provide me with proportions and relationships. When I leave that world and rely only upon my imagination, I feel lost, needing something to grab onto that is simply not there.
This morning I sat down with a piece of hot-press watercolor paper. I’m trying to figure out how to use it so I thought I’d doodle a bit. This sketch started with an eye. Then I added some hairs around it. This led to the addition of a nose and I was off in never-never-land, trying to figure out how to draw a mouse.
I don’t know how to draw a mouse. I’m sure I got the proportions wrong but my serendipitous road took me to needing a mouse all scrunched up while trying to hold onto something. Where are a mouse’s feet anyways? I don’t really know. I was just doodling. Anyways, here it is. Mice, even poorly proportioned mice are cute.
My buddy Yvan has told me that I needed to spend more time drawing from imagination. According to him, if you do this you will never look at the world the same because you’ll always be building a vocabulary so you can draw from imagination. I think he’s right. I need to go look at some mice.
As a street sketcher, I’m used to coming to these blog posts with stories about where I went, what I saw, and why I drew what I drew. What do studio artists talk about anyways?
Here’s a little sketch from my imagination. I spent a few minutes trying out some Fabriano Artistico hot-press paper. Watercolor acts very differently than on cold-press paper and It’ll take a while to figure out how to use it.
