Author Archives: Jamie

Illustrated Food Diary

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!

Everyday Sketching 2025 Week 21

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!

Montezuma’s Castle and Well

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.

New Sketches in a Limited Palette

Finally, a new pair of sketches! I was heading out, and I brought my sketchbook with me. In order to get back into the swing of things, I thought I could try to push to just draw something every day. The May challenge in the Liz Steel Patreon this month is a limited palette, I decided to go pretty extreme with it, and I brought with me only two pens.

I drew the flowers on the table with just two colors of pen. These are Sailor Shikiori Dual Sided pens in colors Doyou, and Waka-Uguisu. To get the pale washes I used a palette, and a water brush, scribbling with the pen onto the palette to make a small pool of ink. I did the full sketch on location, and only did the faded background once I got home, since the white petals needed a background to show up.

My second sketch was of my grocery bags. With costs rising, I like to have some sort of record, and grocery sketches are a fun way to do that, and still get a sketch in!

Everyday Sketching Week 20

Perhaps I should wait and post these with whatever wonderful sketches I will do this week? Perhaps I should not post these at all? Most would not. But I’m a completist, and I’m far more likely to give myself grace and room to perhaps sketch something after having completed this struggle week and moved on.

I love watercolor, and even simple watercolor blocks give joy.

This one does a good job of showing the difficulty in smooth blends using this Stillman & Birn Delta Paper. This was actually wet on wet, but you can’t tell! These sunset colors are Indigo, Cobalt Blue Violet, and Quin Gold, all Daniel Smith.

This one, I love. I used a favorite green pigment, Forest Green by Sennelier, along with Daniel Smith Van Dyke Brown, and a little Indigo to make a dark grey/black. I splashed it with water to add texture. Just playing with watercolor is a lot of fun.

Everyday Sketching 2025 Week 18

Trying to catch-up on blank pages in the sketchbook, while still struggling to sketch. So I’ve used some stencils and abstracts to get going again.

Simple color blocks representing the environment and colors around me for those days.

Here I used a stencil with watercolor paint. This works surprisingly well. I would have expected more bleeding and runs under the stencil since I’m using a wet media, but I really like the results. A flower pattern stencil to represent Easter. I faded into a gentler background wash with the idea of writing a text block there, but I didn’t get to it. I used Hansa Yellow Light, Hansa Yellow Medium, Quin Gold, Quin Rose, and Shadow Violet.

A pure abstract using the desert color palette. Daniel Smith’s Earth: Desert to Mountains. With the addition of Serpentine Green, because I live for greens. Add a blue, and I think this palette would be a perfect limited color palette for painting the desert.

Feeling the spring vibes for May, so I took a stencil and inked it black, then painted these loose, free-hand blossoms over it. I used Potter’s Pink, Van Dyke Brown, and Serpentine Green.

The sun was glowing on these bushes, so I had to try to capture that spring green light. Serpentine Green, and Apatite Genuine. I painted the foliage and bushes with a rigger 4 brush. I haven’t used riggers like this before, and I enjoyed it. The cinderblock wall was done with 1/2″ flat brush, trying to get the texture without overwhelming this paint only, direct watercolor sketch.

I still have the blank spaces for the Montezuma’s Well and Montezuma’s Castle to fill, but this week I filled all other blank areas. Here are the full pages:

Everyday Sketching 2025 Week 17

Struggling to sketch, but I did get this one scene from Montezuma’s Well painted onto that mostly empty page of my sketchbook. Still more to fill.

I did the Seven Lines exercise for Travel sketching, but felt the pages looked too barren in the flow of this particular sketchbook, so I gave those pages some background colors to also help differentiate the multiple sketches per page.

I am improving on doing these slightly textured background washes.

Seven Lines Again

Travel Sketching has begun, and I’m definitely needing the practice! I recently traveled and did not sketch on location. Still working on that! It was so crowded I feared I’d be in the way too much, hogging a bench, etc. Therefore practicing very fast techniques should help in the future.

The assignment is to take some of our own scenes and use only seven lines to draw them. Here is my previous post with this exercise, when I took the course last year.