A Few Sketches

I opened a new sketch book in March and I have shared some of the new sketches I’ve done, but not all of them. This particular book is turning out to be a lesson for me. I found this book at an art museum bookstore and I loved the size, the square shape, the ribbon page marker and the elastic that holds the book together. The book was sealed in plastic wrap with no open book on display. And, unfortunately, there was no information about the weight or quality of the paper. I remember looking for that information and not finding it. I decided to take a chance. So there’s the lesson. The quality of the paper is not good enough for using watercolor paints, or any paints. Images bleed through to the other side of the page and ruin one, if not both sketches. I will relegate this book to sketching with pencil and pen only and purchase another sketchbook for sketches that I want to enhance with watercolor.

Here are the pages I’ve done in the last month. Click on an image for a larger view.

This sweet flower was sketched and painted from a greeting card.

Here are some succulents that are in my strawberry pot.

You can see the bleeding through of the sketch and watercolor that is on the other side of this page, a hawk that I found in a jewelry advertisement of the Sunday paper.

The hawk in the ad had quite a bauble dangling from its mouth. He also looked every bit as stern as he does in my sketch.

I do try to heed encouragement from teachers who have urged sketching from live subjects but posing hawks are difficult to come by and these charming red flowers are not always in season when you want to sketch them. I was inspired by those images and decided to pick up a pencil. I’m glad I did.