07 Mar 10}
This little Daler Rowney Book is now completed, with more ballpoint sketches:



A sunny day seduced me to think it was already warm enough to sit outside and sketch:







At some point my blue ballpoint pen ran out of ink, and I switched to a black one – cheap, and with a very thin line, just as Peter Cusack has described the ones he uses. I think I get why. There’s a whole world of subtlety that just wasn’t possible with my thick blue one, and which I am just starting to explore.


As usual, more pictures and bigger resolutions on flickr.
27 Feb 10}
My charcoal sketches were going along great until I had to sharpen my pencil. When it was about half the length it had when I had started sharpening I gave up, and decided to keep in my sketching to media that take being ‘on the road’ a lot better. But I didn’t just want to go back to my usual pencil & line stuff, so I turned to my waterbrush:



Then I rememberd Peter Cusack’s Subway Sketches from Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life. His sketches are deeply fascinating to me, as he sketches almost the same subject matter as I do, yet his sketches look completely different both from mine and from those of other public transport sketchers. His sketches seem to be all about planes, and portray volume in ways I feel I have never succeeded to do. So I decided to emulate him for a while. Not to claim his style as my own or to imitate forever, but to learn from it what I can. Because I think there is a lot. My first attempt, now back with the pencil, concentrated on hatching (which I so have to practice properly one day!):



But they were not satisfying at all, so I looked at his actual sketches again, and for the first time ever I’m now using a ballpoint pen for sketching, as he does (except I do use blue). I absolutely love it! I never really liked the pure lines ballpoint pens make, neither in drawing nor writing, but the nuances that are possible with this less linear style of sketching with them are amazing. Here’s one of my first attempts, more already on their way:

18 Feb 10}
After the beige comes grey …



… and then brown:




More on flickr.
17 Feb 10}
After I finished my little Daler Rowney I started with another Fabriano Artist’s Journal – this time the ‘Classic’ version, alternating between bright white and a more crème colored paper:

But I felt like experimenting more with washes, and combinations with dry and wet media (keeping the pencil lines while enjoying the flow of the brush as well), and ended up with (mostly) charcoal and wash (with a waterbrush):





I started really liking this technique. I also started to be really annoyed with the Fabriano Journal’s paper, because although I love it for everything else, it cannot hold a wash properly. So this buckled. A lot. And for the first time in a long while I decided to abandon a sketchbook before it was finished to be picked up again later, and to turn to something else for now. The something else is another little Daler Rowney Sketchbook, similar in size to the last one I used, but with 150 gsm paper (in contrast to the first’s 100 gsm), which holds up well to my washes so far:




As usually also found on flickr.
17 Jan 10}
In the past three months I’ve filled my first Fabriano Artist’s Journal, after having lusted for it for years.



I think that the cover held up remarkably well for something that isn’t as strong and stiff as a moleskine, for example. I absolutely love the paper. The different colors are excellent for experimenting with different media—I’ve started to use chalk & sanguine on sketches, which works well on the medium toned pages, or dark ink in a waterbrush + chalk on the really dark ones, where pencil is just too faint (but not many experiments in this first batch!). But in general this paper is great for pencil: it has the feel of a smooth paper, yet a texture that makes it easy to get a great variety of lines out of a HB propeller pencil, from faint and exact to dark and dirty. The only thing it does not do is hold up well with washes. Remarkable opacity for paper with this small grammature. The further you get to the middle the less flat it opens up, so not too good for spreads. One caveat: If you use both sides of a page/spread, you’ll might want to have a fixative handy. I noticed my pencil lines rubbing off, at least where I made them dark, but I was too lazy to fix every day, and it shows. I don’t mind that much, as my sketches are never really ‘neat’ anyway. Also, I do not write in my sketchbooks much, so I’m not sure about how well it is to use with pens etc. Here the specs from dickblick; I bought mine at Cass Art in London.
These are sketches from the first section, a rather neutral beige:












05 Jan 10}
I love London, maybe simply because I love how it looks. Compared with Berlin, most of the houses where people actually live are small, and kind of askew. Outside plumbing makes for interesting lines and patterns, and the chimneys are really cute.
I like the colours of brick walls, especially old ones where different kinds of bricks mix.

The storefronts (old school ones) look so colourful, and the typography so elegant (well, certainly more so than my attempts to reproduce it).

I find the stark difference between front and back surprising, and often I prefer the back, maybe because it looks so very much not like the tidiness that is Germany.
London even seems to love me back a bit; or at least it felt that way when somebody sitting at my table in a café asked if he could buy the little sketch I had just finished, and commissioned something bigger as well. Here a preparatory sketch and a photograph of the finished watercolour:

This one is much bigger than the others (which are more or less postcard-sized), 35 cm to 25 cm, and I took my time with it, hence more details.