Lessons in Paper

I believe this was my very first attempt at sketching my house. It may be my only attempt to date, now that I think about it.

After this, my sketchbook efforts get quite sketchy indeed. I wanted to sketch daily, but missed the mark, so I’d leave pages blank. Sometimes I’d fill them in with either notes of what I wanted to sketch, or of quick pencil thumbnails. The next ten or so pages of this sketchbook are quite a hodgepodge of miscellany and incomplete pages. Eventually I simply moved on, and now this is like a time capsule of those very first, very insecure efforts!

Here is when I started to realize that maybe the paper in this book was giving the troubles and not my skills. The bleed through that was happening is what convinced me this paper was not well suited to the watercolor techniques I was most interested in.