Video: How to Pre-prepare backgrounds in your sketchbook

If you can't view the video here, use this YouTube  link 

Hope you enjoy the video, it was fun to make. If you'd like more videos then tell me in the comments. 

Below are a few recent pages using pre-prepared backgrounds so you can see how that looks, and what the possibilities are.  The F&W acrylic inks from the video were used along with some other types of acrylic paints , all of which were kept very thin. 

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 Pentel Pocket Brush Pen and gouache over a pre-prepared background.

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 Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, Canada Goose studies from life.

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 Pentel pocket Brush Pen, gouache, white Deco marker

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Pentel Pocket brush pen, gouache, white Deco marker

The Ritual of Beginning a New Sketchbook

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           I have a list of Zen Things, pinned to the wall above my desk in the studio. One of the things on the list says Develop Rituals.  I like that. Rituals are powerful and valuable.  I like rituals and don't think there are enough shared community rituals in our lives anymore.

So it's up to us at the family and personal level to develop rituals for ourselves. Rituals will ground us, center us, comfort us and provide continuity in our lives in good times and bad. Over the last year or two I've developed a ritual for beginning a new sketchbook. Because keeping and illustrated journal is so important to me, this ritual has become one of my very favorite creative activities. I even look upon it as a sacred ritual, sanctifying my journal as a space where I can open up and see beyond the mere visible universe and hear beyond the empty chatter of the world to the voice of the Divine Presence call to my deepest heart and most authentic self. You might not think a journal is all that, but to me it is.  This is a new brand of sketchbook for me. Made by Hand-Book Journal Co.  it is filled with Fluid watercolor paper, a nice cold pressed

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surface, not too rough that takes paint very nicely and allows for both control and spreading floating washes of wet in wet paint.

The cover here may look black but it is actually a deep navy blue, quite nice and refined looking.  I have a nifty new tool, a heat pen, that allows me to design and then cut my own stencils.

So with those things in hand I could begin my new sketchbook ritual.
Which begins with picking the type of sketchbook I would like to work in for the next few months. Spiral or hardbound, large or small, vertical or horizontal format, watercolor paper, mixed media paper, or dry media drawing paper, and then which brand of paper in the book. The book I choose is often determined by the places I may be planning to sketch in the coming weeks. For this time I chose a smaller book because I knew that I had several trips planned, zoo, botanical garden, agricultural fair, all of which would be crowded so I wanted a size that would be easy to manage in a crowd. Once I've decided on the type of sketchbook I set about personalizing the cover. This is more than just decoration though. I try to settle into a broad theme for the book, which is often based on the

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 season we're in since most of my sketches are nature based. I used my new stencil cutting tool to make a stencil that, while not a specific actual plant is inspired by a number of things going on in my yard right now.  The hydrangeas are drying on the bush and turning lovely colors, the wild black raspberry and wine-berries are turning all kinds of rich scarlet colors, and fall mums are appearing everywhere. So the design is an amalgamation of all those images. I used Golden Fluid acrylics to paint the stencils. I like to use what I call a wet stenciling technique along with the usual dry brush technique for stenciling. Wet stenciling involves having a lot of paint on your brush and letting the paint push through the stencil and bleed into the areas adjoining it, blurring the image. I like this because if you use a dry brush to stencil everything you get a very regular, mechanical perfect set of repeating images, that looks, well, stenciled. I prefer to create a more painterly, layered look by letting some of the images blur, dry and then placing the stencil back over the image and using a lighter color and a dry brush to create a cleaner stencil image of parts of the design. When everything is dry I seal it with either Modge Podge or Chroma Binder Medium. So the loose theme of this book will be the variety of changes going on during this transitional season of dying off we call autumn.

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Next, I peruse books and articles to find quotes that speak to me at this moment in my life. In this journal I've chosen two quotes from women poets. These along with my contact information and sunburst hand carved stamp go on the inside cover of my book. 

Finally, I set aside time to work in an unhurried way on the opening page of my new sketchbook so that the first page is appealing and carries through on the loose theme I've chosen.  On this page I say good-bye to summer as today is the autumnal equinox. Some treasures from the sea, a reminder of the beach days of summer, including another hand cut stencil of pebbles, and a brief reflection on the passing of summer and the growing darkness of autumn finish off the page.

So there's the ritual, seek out the new sketchbook, find a loose theme, personalize the cover to embody the theme, find meaningful quotes for the inside cover and set aside unhurried time to work on the first page as a way to enter into the process and manifestation of this particular book.

What will I see and experience through this journal?  What will I learn? What will I take notice of?  What will I discover?  I don't know.  It's all in front of me now beckoning me on to creative output and mindful engagement with life.

Creating Backgrounds on your Sketchbook Pages

Winter Blues

This is a recent sketch (Feb. 26, 2014) that shows what happens when the winter drags on and I'm starved for green and sketching time outdoors. I start to do all kinds of crazy things in my sketchbook.

Sketching nature is my favorite subject, but as the winter drags on and the snow is deep and the temperatures barely pushing above twenty  I'm forced to sketch the same views from my windows or find something else to sketch.

That's actually a pretty good thing because when I look back at my sketchbooks from years past I find that my February sketchbooks are often the most interesting and creative. Happily, adversity begets creativity.

So here's whats happening in this sketch. I'm working in a 7x10 Stillman & Birn spiral bound Delta series sketchbook.  It has lovely heavy weight 180 lb paper, ivory in tint and similar to cold pressed watercolor paper in texture.

 When I'm feeling cooped up or just plain un-creative and need to add some pizazz to get me going I will create backgrounds on my sketchbook pages to work on top of.

How to Create a Background for your Sketchbook Pages

I've tried a bunch of different things and like using Golden High Flow acrylics best. This is the High Flow not the Fluid acrylic. The high flow is ink like, very thin. Even so I tend to thin it down more so that the paint is very transparent and the grain of the paper shows through. Here, because it's still the dead of winter and I'm desperately in need of some sparkle I've thinned the high flow with Utrecht's  Illuminating Medium 
which along with thinning down the paint add just a subtle bit of shimmer to the paint. I squirt the paint and medium out on a plastic palette and use a brayer (like you'd use for printmaking) to roll the paint onto the page. That's a fun way to do things because you can move the paint directionally, and have areas that over lap and create layers and textures. Don't stress about this part, if there are darker blotches created when the brayer first hits the paper or if the paint runs out and the application get raggedy that's all good stuff, it's what will make the page interesting and visually rich.

Working  over the Background

If you intend to use watercolor or gouache over the background be sure to keep the layer of high flow thin or you'll have a problem getting the watercolors to adhere, they may just bead up on the acrylic. If that happens then I'd suggest that you switch to Faber-Castel brush tip pens, they're pigment india ink, transparent and look a lot like watercolors. I used both in this sketch.

Stencils

Stencils are fun and make me happy. Sometimes I make my own but the one I used here (which is supposed to depict cracked glass but I think looks like a spider's web) I bought.

White over Dark in your Sketchbook

Using white over a dark area always brings a "pop" to a sketchbook page and I try to incorporate that as much as possible. White markers can be hard to come by and some work better than others. The whites in the sketch were created Using Daniel Smith titanium white watercolor and Uni-Ball Signo White pen.

Sketching Inspiration

Nature is glorious and inspires me. Snow is wonderful, the first couple of times in the winter, but frozen snow and freezing temps lose their appeal after a couple of months. The great thing about keeping a sketchbook journal is that it helps you find inspiration in every day things. The play of thin wintery light through the empty wine bottles and the little plant silhouetted on the studio window sill, plus  the incorporation of the endless snow outside and the cobwebs which perfectly captured the cobwebs in my mind at the end of this long, long winter helped me create a page that captures the essence of this moment in time and that makes me happy!