Dressing up Your Sketchbook

One of the first signs you are making progress is that moment when you have been drawing and drawing and begin to wonder,"where is this going?"

Line is expressive. It is elegant. It is very personal. Just as with your handwriting, your drawn line is yours and yours alone. Some artists, particularly cartoonists, spend a lifetime perfecting their line art.

Nonetheless, you may want to enhance the pages of your book with more dramatic features.

Here are some steps which will enliven an existing sketch and be part of the next phase of your art.

Select a tool to make some very black areas, being careful that the dark does not bleed through to the other side (or to the next page.) Sharpie's are dangerous. A soft pencil is good. Can you get a 6B or 9B? ( These soft, dense graphite lines and areas need to be sprayed with a workable sprayfix or they will rub off, transfer to the back of the previous page, as well as get smudged .)

Pen and ink or brush and ink work well. I am addicted to ball point pens. Try a pen with a pointed felt "brush" tip. These come in colors, too.

Which black areas? Try making a dark background, if you think your shapes are simple enough. Experiment with patterns. You can add more lines to create a dense and dramatic form.

Of course, you can use water color or acrylic for your dramatic darks. Just mind the thickness* of your sketch book paper. Thinner papers wrinkle with water color and the paper puckers with acrylic (it shrinks as it dries).

You might want to move slowly. Take a single move forward and play with it. You will find that your hand naturally wants to shade, make sort strokes, create little dots and swirlygigs.

I have posted one merfish with a decorative pattern of blotches and another where the line work begins to give a sense of form and the suggested water places the creature, giving a hint of depth to the scene.

* Thickness is described by "weight." A standard weight for watercolor paper is 140lb. Most sketch books are far lighter than that, but a few have multiole sheets of watercolor paper sandwiched between lighter weight sheets.