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.

“The ‘Look’ of Sketchbooks”

Sketchbooks come in all kinds of flavors. Art Supply companies treat us to a new variety every season.

Here is what counts--archival paper ( meaning it is acid free and will not turn brittle and yellow over time) and that the book will lay flat when opened.

You may want a tiny one, exchanging the ease of tucking it in a pocket for the extra size and several more pages in a larger book. That results in needing to buy a succession of books. Keep them dated or numbered, Ok?

Expensive bindings and beautiful paper may inspire you. Or, inhibit. Sometimes noting that I am about to lay an ink line down on a fabulous surface just stops me cold.

Medium sized and medium priced books are functional. I use the pocket size when I go out and the larger ones at home.

Some artists want a foldout book. It acts as an ongoing story, which, like a Chinese scroll painting tells about an adventure.

For the beginner, focusing your attention is helpful. You might want boundaries rather than the unfolding, open-ended story. Try making little square or rectangular “boxes” to a page. Practice working within confined shapes. Let the limits sharpen you sense of composition and design. You can always scrawl all over the next page. It is your book. It is to learn with and for play.

I use a ball point pen a lot. With pencil, you can erase, but I always lose my eraser. Pencil art really shoould be given a light coating of workable spray-fix.

There are days when my rectangles are more accurate than others. I work towards "fast," more than accurate. Note: I made no location or date notes! oops!

This book is about 8"x8."

Getting Started with Art

Welcome to my blog. People ask me all the time me how to get started as an artist.

The simplest answer is to begin drawing. The subject truely doesn't matter. You can draw anything that pleases you.

Let's keep your learning process just for yourself and just for now. I prefer a sketchbook. It's small, it's private, and I can carry it around. For example, while waiting in the doctor's office, you can draw a chair leg or practice your caricature skills on the person sitting across from you.

This is the central process of art. The secret is to do it all the time.

To get started, you need a small unlined notebook and something to draw with. You can use your sketchbook as a graphic journal by dating your work and adding notes.

Sometimes my sketches are more like doodles. The birds were done with no bird in front of me. Sometimes, I will decide to master the ins and outs of a sunflower, or whatever the subject. Making a start at drawing is more important than technique or the resulting piece of art. Drawing gets better the more you practice.

I am convinced that everyone can do as much art as they want to. Once, teaching a high school class , which just happened to have half the football team registered, I asked them " Are you attracted to certain record labels? Do you enjoy looking at photographs? Do you show the world your good taste by the clothes you wear?" And, since they all did those things, they suddenly felt that being in an art class was not having been sent to Siberia. At the end of the quarter, that turned out to be one of my best classes.

In this blog we will move through drawing and painting. Artists at all levels are welcome.