Can you believe it has been over a year since I last blogged about my sketchbook 😬

Which is funny because I consider my sketchbook/s to be probably the most important part of my art business – it’s where I improve my drawing, experiment with colour, and basically just play around and create ideas. For quite a few months now I’ve been practising a daily sketchbook routine – I might make my next blog post about this, how and why I started a daily sketchbook because it is so good!

Anyway this blog post is a little show and tell of my favourite sketchbook pages over the last year or so – and when I look back at them I realised there is a bit of a theme of FISH, WAVES, and PAINT 😂.

You can probably tell I’ve been using a lot of mixed media – there are two reasons for this:

1. I love the effects you can get by layering different materials over each other.

2. THE REAL REASON – I have a little bit of an art material addiction. So much so that I’ve had to unsubscribe myself from art store newsletters and I no longer allow myself to visit art shops unless I really need something – then I try really hard not to look at anything else 😂 So my theory is that by doing mixed media I feel totally justified in owning so many different art materials ha ha!

All of these sketchbook pages started with a random paint swatch – I like to use up left-over paint from other projects by putting it in my Winsor & Newton sketchbook with either a brush or an old credit card. Mostly acrylic paint but I also will add gouache or watercolour.

I end up with a few pages of different colour paint swatches in my sketchbook. Then I will have the idea of what I want to draw (like a particular fish) and I look for the paint swatch that I think will suit it best. I don’t intentionally create a background to suit a particular subject and that is half the fun, matching the paint swatches with the subjects. I did this heaps on our last overseas trip, I took a sketchbook full of paint swatches and would pick a memorable photo/scene each day to paint, spending time choosing the most suitable paint swatch – this was a really nice way to do a travel sketchbook.

Anyway, to draw over the paint swatches I used many art materials (ofcourse) include watercolours, pencils, white gel pen, paper collage, acrylic paint, black fineliners and Posca paint pens… yep just a few things!

Tell me has this inspired you to put paint swatches in your sketchbook?