Challenge Update

So let’s see where we are with the sketchbook challenge. I’ll start with the Nassau sketchbook. I’ve now made 38 pictures within it and I’m on target to finish it about the 20^th April. Yesterday I decided it was time to try watercolour in it. First of all I made this painting of Paris.

My first thought was that the The colours are a little washed out compared with the Crawford and Black I painted in last week. The cockling is not apparent in this scan, but it really is pretty bad, and it hasn’t just affected the other side of the page, but also the next page and the page after. There is just a spot where the colour leaked through onto the other side of the page. Well, it did occur to me that I had not made a painting that used wet on wet so much in the C and B, so I made another picture in pretty much the same way that I made the painting in the C and B last week.

The parrot is a better picture than Paris, but again, it still looks a little washed out. The cockling on the other side of the page hasn’t stopped me drawing on it, but it’s there.

Well, here’s some of the sketches I’ve made this week in it.

They’re okay – the 274 bus is quite a nice picture, but it took a long time to get that kind of result in this book. These were all done with a 0.2mm fine liner, and I find the surface can be a little scratchy at times. It’s harder to get subtle differences in tone with shading. I’m almost 40 pages in, which will be a third of the book, so I’ve no doubt I’ll be able to keep going and finish it, but it’s really not very enjoyable.

I’ve made a few more pictures in the Crawford and Black too. Only 5 this week, but we’ve used 26 pages of it now and we only need to use 40 in order to reduce the number of pages left to 120 which will be quite reasonable. Here’s some scans of this week’s pictures.

I don’t see a difference in quality from those in the Nassau book. There’s not a lot in it but I’d say that the surface of the C & B is rougher than the Nassau and consequently slightly less easy and less enjoyable to draw in. I will give you another update next week.