These hot summer days are slowing me down significantly! I’m continuing with the food sketches, but not much else. Likely because I’m not really leaving the house for anything but grocery shopping, and I keep forgetting to bring my sketchbook for that. But watching shows gives a good opportunity to try some quick portraits.
This week’s food sketches:
The temperatures heat up, and we are under Extreme Heat Advisories, and Air Quality Alerts, so I’m staying inside. Consequently not sketching nearly as much as I’d like. Happy Summer Solstice! Here is a little map I drew from a game I’m playing.
Food sketches for the week. Since the subject matter is so repetitive, I’m working on varying the methods.
Doom scrolling this week, so not much sketching. Trying ways to capture events. I used abstracts and attempted some portraits. I like the abstracts I made with stencils and watercolor.
I color tested some new paints. I had to find out what the Warm Yellow Light and Naples Yellow Reddish looked like when I saw them online. Then I had to find out how they compare to Jaune Brilliant, which they resembled strongly. My obsession with sepia continues so I color tested these three tubes.
The first two weeks of this challenge has proven interesting. It is a big effort to sketch every meal, every day, and I’m definitely learning a lot about not only sketching in faster ways, but in managing time so it fits.
After the first ink and wash sketch took 3 hours for the day, I realized I need a much faster approach to sketching these if I’m going to be able to sustain the project daily. However, I noted in past food sketchbooks, I get a bit bored of it, so this time I thought I’d vary my techniques and tools from day to day, and that might keep things from getting too boring. A couple weeks in I’m already thinking this is a bit too much of a time commitment, but I need to finish the sketchbook at the very least!
The fastest method by far is paint only, shapes only. I do love this style of sketching, and that’s what I’d default to when busy in the past, so I have whole food sketchbooks full of that style. I look forward to continuing, and focusing a bit more on page design to see if I can do interesting things that way, too.
The start of the Stillman and Birn Beta softcover, 8.5 x 5.5 inch sketchbook. I have used this paper before, but it has been a while. Already I notice it doesn’t have the same problem when it gets extra wet that the Delta had, so I’m glad about that.
I begin my sketchbook with my palette or other tools, and I thought this time I’d document my regular watercolor palette, especially as I’m thinking of a lot of color changes to this. There are a number of colors I’m not using. I put this together as a combination of Jane Blundell’s Ultimate Mixing palette, and the color recommendations for a watercolor course I was enrolled in. I never completed that course, now that I think about it. Hmmm. Nevertheless, this is my palette. The only color I use frequently that is not in this palette is Quin Gold.
The new Gansai Tambi Granulating 2 color set arrived and I had to test these colors immediately! Some really beautiful separation is happening in some of these.
A week went by without any sketching, and to get the mojo flowing again, I reached for the stencils. Using watercolor with the stencils is really fun. They bleed and warp, but the color blends I can achieve, and the abstract feel of them suits the days they are representing.
This week’s full page spreads:
The Week I lost my watercolor palette! Eek! I looked everywhere! Multiple times! It took most of the week, but I did find it, thankfully. Not surprisingly I’d put it into a bag to take with me, but then forgot I’d packed that bag.
I’ve started taking Danny Gregory’s class Start Your Sketchbook Journal, which is at Sketchbook Skool, to reinvigorate a daily practice. His books, Creative License and An Illustrated Life were instrumental in my starting a sketchbook in the first place, so it feels like coming home to the initial spark. It is a 31-day, self-paced course with a new prompt for each day, designed to get you documenting life as it is. Perfect! What sketches I did do this week, were primarily for those prompts.
The full pages:
This ends the Stillman and Birn Delta Sketchbook. I’ve found that by the end I was doing a bit better with it, adjusting. My primary issue with it is that the paper pills when you get lots of water on it. It does keep ink and paint on the surface a bit longer, so I could work things a bit more than I could on the Alpha and Gamma papers.
The sketches:
The page spreads:
I also started a new Illustrated Food Diary Sketchbook:
One subject that is always available, and is conducive to using different techniques for sketching is food. This might be just the subject I need to kickstart the resurrection of a daily sketching practice!
In past years I’ve kept a food sketchbook here and there. Sketchbook Volume 5 was food from 1 February 2020 to 11 March 2020.
Sketchbook Volume 7 was food from 1 February 2021 to 13 March 2021.
I continued with Sketchbook Volume 8 from 14 March 2021 to 13 April 2021. I picked it up again on 17 January 2022 to 22 January 2022.
Sketchbook Volume 11, in August 2022, I was sketching food in with everything else, instead of having a dedicated sketchbook for it.
I would sketch food off and on irregularly for the remaining volumes until July 2024. I felt the food was dominating the sketchbook too much.
My notes indicate Sketchbook Volume 16 is also food, but I don’t have that one scanned, and I am not entirely sure where it is, so I shall hunt for that one.
I’ll start sketching my food again, though I’ll make no goals for how long. I want to use it to get back into a daily practice. I have a small Stillman and Birn Epsilon 5.5 x 3.5 inch that I briefly used years ago, which seems good to use up. The small size and landscape format works well for food sketches. Thusly I will begin sketchbook volume 21, another food sketches volume.
It will also be nice to document the food, as food prices are going up again. Also, I have always found it very useful to have the visual record of what I eat, as I have so many allergies, and auto-immune issues with food. It’s a big challenge, though, and I’ll admit to some trepidation about even sticking to it for a week! Ha! But hey, a week of daily sketching will no doubt feel great, and I’ll get the sketching daily practice and habit going again. Which is the ultimate goal.
To being strong and with momentum, the beginning of today’s illustrated food diary page!
Not much sketching this week. I had sketched these early on Monday, and wrote about them already.
The rest of the week was just the date and temperature until I squeezed in a quick sketch of the grocery delivery.
I’m starting to think of ways to get a more consistent practice in, and what do I need for that. I’ll share as I go along, since I know a lot of people want to keep an illustrated diary sketchbook, but struggle with it, too.
Here is the week spread. (I originally typed “weak spread” and almost decided to leave it, since that fits, too! Ha!)
I will confess that I’m looking forward to finishing this Stillman and Birn Delta book and moving on to different paper. I have only four spreads to do, and one of them has some swatches I’m building up on the last page.
I will continue with my challenge to work through all of the Stillman and Birn options available in this 5.5×8.5 inch landscape softcover size sketchbook. I am learning a lot about their papers! I won’t be using the Delta again, due to the pilling under more water, and the bleeding various mediums. I do like the Ivory color paper, but the Gamma paper is much better behaved for what I do. Next up is the Beta paper, which I think is going to behave like the Delta, only in white? I’ll find out!
A sketch here, and a sketch there, I’ve finally finished the pages for Montezuma’s Well, and Montezuma’s Castle.
I did this primarily paint only, direct watercolor, but then added ink at the end to make the dwellings on the cliff face stand out.
Here is the sketch of the same dwelling that I did a few weeks ago.
For this one I used the Earth Desert to Mountain palette, direct watercolor.
An ink only attempt with water soluble sink in a fude pen. The ink started to run wild so I just stopped where it was, and let it dry.
The full page layouts with sketches and stickers from the gift store. It feels really good to finally finish these two pages for the trip in April.
Jamie's Sketchbook 