Don't Give Up So Fast! Sketchbook Woes.

The Subject Matter: Great Horned Owl (Bird Acre Sanctuary Maine)

We all have a collection. Those horrid, horrid sketchbook disasters. Oh we started out with good intentions, but then, we lost focus, or stiffened up because someone was looking over our shoulder or the subject matter was just too darn complicated. I would challenge any artist out there to show me a *perfect* sketch book from cover to cover. Oh. Ok. I do have a few...if you don't look too closely you wont notice the remnants of pages that have been torn out.

The offending attempt at sketching him

Well there is no perfect solution. A noted, professional, fantastically good artist instructor shared this bit of wisdom: When we go out with our camera and take pictures, only a few out of the dozen snapped are noteworthy. The more we snap the more we learn about taking pictures and slowly, but surely, more and more pictures are keepers. The same goes for sketch books. And hold onto those bad ones too, because even if what you did didn't work or turn out as you desired, you still learned something.

And sometimes not all hope is lost...

Recently I had an opportunity to sketch some Birds of Prey at the Stanbrooke /Bird Acre Sanctuary in Maine.

As you can see, not all my drawings were masterpieces!

It wasn't until a few weeks later that I was able to sit back down and spend some time on my disaster. I was working with my traveling watercolor kit so there were some limitations with what I could do, but I just took the leap and started working unconventionally. Using watercolor like acrylics or gouache to help cover up my mistakes.

As you can see, he's not something for the museum, and even now needs more work on those eyes, but a great improvement from the first attempt. All because I didn't give up on him!

Selecting good materials for a sketchbook can be a great passive assist on projects such as this, when you need your substrate/paper and medium to go beyond its intended use and still hold up.

Pentalic puts out a series of "Nature Sketch"  books that I adore. They come in a variety of sizes to scale to your comfort. The cream colored paper is thick and holds up to repeated washes and still drys pretty flat. It can take pencil, watercolor, pastels, oil pastels, pen and ink....the works...

My brushes, I admit are a little mixed. A few high quality ones for details so they hold there point, but I also have some medium grade ones that I am rather abusive with pushing color around and mushing paint into the surface.

For water colors, I do like the Holbein series or M Graham series. The tubes don't seem to be as messy as the thinner tubes.


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