I’ve been playing with grids—more about that on another day—and looking out the window at the world.
Why not sketch the tree cutting process? Sometimes you just want to take it all in—and I didn’t want to get pigments in the kitchen sink!
The sketch on the page is an actor I’d sketched the day before. (Grids have been influencing everything in my September journaling including my drawing borders!) The splotchiness is the way this non-art paper doesn’t accept ink washes, but I love working on it anyway.
For the sketch I used a dried-out brush pen (duh) before laying in the ink washes. (It looks like graphite, but that’s just how dried out it is. I wish pens came this way, and lasted with a marginal bit of ink for a long time!)
Below is a close up so you can see what happens to the paper. And yes, splotches do bleed through to the next page. How bad the seepage is varies on how much water I use in an area, and how much ink, and whether the ink is dye- or pigment based. What do I do when I turn the page and it’s all blotchy? I sketch there anyway. If I really love a sketch I’ll scan it before continuing on in the book, in case the next page bleeds back through to a previous sketch. Other than that I just live with it. I’m totally in love with the resultant, “random” texturing which occurs. I love buying odd “notebooks” in the book store—totally unsuitable for sketching and painting. Adventure awaits.
I can imagine all kinds of fun organic landscape and seascape shapes in your collage grid! That page has a lovely overall balance of shapes, colours, and notan👍. Our neighbour had a massive backyard maple tree cut down while we were away this summer. It took us almost a week before we noticed because there was an even larger tree blocking our view of the missing tree!!! Always love to see your people portrait sketches👍. Glad to hear your backdoor glass got replaced.
Thanks Paul, for checking in. Still hoping to finish the last of the grid-project grids. But does one every finish that type of project?
It is so great to have the backdoor glass fixed, in time for cooler temperatures (we were down to the inner pane).