The “30 Days of Sketchbook Joy” challenge has been over for a few days, now, but I’m just getting around to blogging about it. I’ll save my comments on the challenge as a whole until the end of this post.
Day 28: Pink Base Layer
I’m not sure I did this “right”, but I took it to mean that you should start by painting the background all pink, then work on top of that. I can see how it might work well with some media, and I know there are people who do a whole underpainting in one color, with watercolor—but I don’t know if people generally paint the whole page one color in watercolor this way.
Here’s how it went for me.
I painted almost the whole page in pink, leaving a border unpainted. I drew three cards to give me some direction:
“Home”, “Lemon Lime”, and “Make It a Postcard or Stamp”.
I went with the stamp idea, sketched something simple in pencil with “home” for my theme, and added another layer (or two) of watercolor, with some other media for the white details.
I finished with some black ink pen and acrylic paint markers.
My “lime green” watercolor didn’t look nearly as green on the pink background, which was to be expected.
I wonder if this idea of using a base layer may work better with gouache or acrylic… Or maybe it just needs practice or a different approach. I do like the warmth the pink base layer adds.
Day 29: Speedy Sparrows
I suspect you were meant to set a timer for this prompt (to make the sparrows “speedy”), but I didn’t do that. Instead, I googled “sparrow”, found some silhouettes of birds purporting to be sparrows, and went with that.
First, I painted a sky using whatever blues happened to be on my ceramic palette, then I sketched a simple outline of a bird in flight. At this point, I wasn’t sure where I was going with it, except that there would be a sparrow.
Next day, I filled in my pencil outline of the bird with black marker. I think my next step was to take a few tempera paint sticks and scribble some splotches of color in the opposite corner, more or less at random, but with the idea of a building and trees.
The rest of the details were obvious: Crayon in somewhat coordinating colors on the bird and black dip pen on the landscape below.
I felt the sky was looking empty, so I tried to paint some white gouache swooshes, but that didn’t show up well (too watered-down), so I added grey ink lines and swirls. Not sure that was a good idea, but oh well. To tie the grey in with the rest of it, I added touches of grey to the building, too. And that was it.
The blue in the sky doesn’t really go perfectly with the rest of the colors, but it’s still better than I expect when I first sketched the bird silhouette.
Day 30: Free Play
This was the day of the book launch, so there wasn’t an official prompt, though the artist behind the challenge (Katie Moody) did a seascape.
I wanted something easy and quick at the end of a busy day, so I went back to the cards for inspiration:
“Birthday”, “Magenta”, and “Add Sparkles”.
I chose a fairly literal interpretation. Birthday cupcakes in magenta (and other pink and purple colors), with some sparkles added in. I also included a mouse to make it a little more interesting. Oh, and I outlined it in ink and used some paint pens and highlighters to make it a little more “mixed media”.
Nothing super exciting, but it was another page in the sketchbook, and I had some fun with it.
Reflecting on the Challenge
After two nearly back-to-back sketchbook challenges, I felt the need for a break. I’ve still spent at least a little time with a paintbrush in my had every day since starting this challenge, but I haven’t been working in the sketchbook for a few days. (Instead, I’ve been swatching some new products and testing them out in some non-sketchbook doodles from a month or more ago. I’ll blog about that, sooner or later.)
I think there’s only one page left empty at the back of the watercolor sketchbook I was using for this challenge—and this is a sketchbook I bought and started back during the pandemic. Maybe 2020? No later than 2021. So you can see that I haven’t really been a devoted user of the sketchbook. I was using blocks of paper most of the time, instead, and I do still like a lot about the blocks—but I’m also starting to see the value of the sketchbook, not to mention the benefits of making the effort to do something creative as often as possible. If not every day, at least most days.
I have a couple of books about keeping a sketchbook, now (including Katie’s new book), and I plan to read them and see how I get on. I don’t know if I’ll try to sketch daily (after this brief hiatus), but maybe I’ll try to do something on certain days of the week. Really, I don’t know that it matters that much whether I’m working in a bound book or loose pages, so long as I’m doing something somewhere to keep things flowing.
Before I started this challenge, I would’ve said I preferred not working in a book, but this evening, when I was painting outside the book, it felt odd not to be working in a sketchbook. I guess it doesn’t take long to form habits!
