Latest Sketches

Here’s the latest sketches in my Royal Talens book. Even going at the rate of one a day I’m can’t see me fishing the book until October/November.

Just over halfway through the Royal Talens book

You know, you have to take motivation where you can find it. My current motivation is nothing more exciting than a desire to fill my Royal Talens sketchbook. I’ve posted about sketchbooks enough recently so I won’t go on too much about it. Well, I’ll try not to. There’s 160 21x13cm pages and I’ve filled 82 of them. By my reckoning at the speed I’m going I should finish the book in mid-November.

So, Rules is Rules

So, I made this rule that I cannot buy another A5 sketchbook until I finish the one I'm Currently using. So before I can start using my new Leuchtturm journal I  told you about in my previous post, I have to finish another book first. Only, which one? My Seawhite of Brighton journal is my current travel journal and I'm keeping that for the next proper trip. So that leaves the Royal Talens that I bought this time last year. Here's some of the sketches I've made in it since my previous post :-

I belong to a wonderful Facebook group called Daily Drawing Challenge. Every day a new photograph is posted and members are invited to produce a picture based on the photo. You don't have to do it on the same day - you're perfectly welcome to trawl back through the archives and pick something from the back catalogue. Most of these were responses to prompts - on a lot of them you can see the number on the bottom referring to the photograph original. 

There's a lot of recent sketches, but then there's a LOT of pages in the Royal Talens - 160 sides of paper. As it is I'm almost but not quite halfway through. But who am I kidding - even if I wasn't wanting to fill the book, I'd probably still be sketching at this rate anyway. I think of it as OSD - Obsessive Sketching Disorder.

Forgive me father for I have sinned. I have bought another sketchbook.

So what is it, a week since I last bought a new sketchbook? Eight and a half days actually. Look, I’d just done a bit more business on Etsy and I wanted to reward myself. I think that I’ve mentioned how much I enjoy reading reviews comparing art materials – it’s a vicarious pleasure which is almost as enjoyable as visiting specialist art supplies and stationery shops in person. Several brands tend to come up a lot in dispatches, and one of these is Hahnemuhle.

Hahnemuhle is a German company that began as a paper mill in the late 16^th century. Amongst quite a wide range of products they offer their own travel sketching journal. It’s in the familiar 13x21cm format, and it sits at the more expensive end of the market. Looking today on Amazon the Hahnemuhle 13x21cm travel journal is quite a bit more expensive than the Moleskine equivalent and more than twice as expensive as the Seawhite A5 Classic Sketching Journal. It has about the same number of pages as the Seawhite too. So I bottled it. I didn’t by a Hahnemuhle travel journal. I did, however, buy a rather cute little product that Hahnemuhle make. It’s their Draft and Sketch mini sketchbook, and you can see it in the photograph below. The other sketchbook in the second photo for comparison is the Royal Talens 9x14cm journal I bought a fortnight or so ago.

Mini? My friends, It’s absolutely tiny. It has 60 sides of paper, but the important thing is that the paper is the same weight – 140 gsm – as the Hahnemuhle travel journal. So at least, I thought, at least it should give me some idea of what to expect from the journal.

Okay then, first impressions. It’s lovely paper for fineliner sketching. It has just the right amount of tooth so that the ink makes very neat crisp and clear lines, so much so that I could use a 0.1mm nib for the finer lines as opposed to the 0.05 I’ve been using on other books, and even this I would abandon for a 0.2mm nib. The first sketch I made was the ink outlining for an ink and watercolour copy of a 1908 illustration Harry Rountree made for his 1908 set of Alice in Wonderland illustrations. I enjoyed this so much I decided to gamble and try to make the next illustration for my Alice story “Alice’s Adventures at the Pole”. And another. And another. Learning from my experience with my Royal Talens I decided to distance myself a little, and while I could still be objective about it, put it to the watercolour test.

Hahnemuhle make it perfectly clear in the packaging and promotional material that this mini sketchbook is suitable for dry media. Most sketchbooks of 130 gsm or more make claims that to be suitable for light watercolour. I did think that it was a bit odd for Hahnemuhle not to say something similar, and decided, what the hell, let’s give it a go. Here’s the result.

At first I thought that it was buckling a bit, but frankly it’s not noticeable at all now. It looks like the watercoloured pages in my seawhite sketchbooks do. And if anything, I’d say that the colours are maybe a little brighter and more vibrant. Blow me down. Comparing the pages where I’ve used watercolour I’d say it has performed better than either the Moleskine or the Royal Talens, and at least as well as the Seawhite. And this little feller is not twice as expensive as the Royal Talens equivalent. However that’s a little misleading since there are more pages in the Royal Talens. There’s no pocket in this and no elastic binding, but then it isn’t claiming to be a travel journal. So is it better or worse value than the small Royal Talens? Well, that all depends on what value means to you. But I have to say, using it today has been like using a little bit of quality. Would I buy a Hahnemuhle travel journal now, knowing what I know? At today’ s Amazon price I probably wouldn’t. But I’d love to be given one!

Alice Project - Illustration 2

I’ve had a really lovely morning. Yesterday I posted my first illustration to my Alice story. Up to this morning I had only written the nonsense poem that would make up a part of the first encounter Alice has with other characters. This morning I wrote the whole of this relatively short episode. I thoroughly enjoyed this as a exercise. I knew what I wated to say, but the mental exercise was working out how to say it, how to get in puns and characterisation etc. When I completed it I made an illustration to accompany the episode. Now, I don’t know I I am ever going to share the story with anyone else so for now all I want to say is that it’s a penguin with glasses, a sack and very bushy eyebrows.

I did write out the description of the character when Alice first sees him underneath the sketch which you can see from the whole two page scan. I’m not sure I quite like it as much as the mammoth ad the elephant sketch, but it really isn’t bad at all. I want to do at least a couple more drawings to illustrate what I’ve written so far – watch this space.

The Honeymoon continues

Yes, it does. The main event of the day art wise yesterday will be the subject of my next post, but in between I sketched a couple more copies of Harry Rountree 1928 Alice illustrations in my new Royal Talens art creations journal.

On the left is the March Hare that I showed you in yesterday’s post. Later on, in the afternoon by way of a sort of comparison piece I drew my copy of Harry Rountree’s White Rabbit.

If I’m being honest I had to double check a couple of times that this is the white rabbit, being as he isn’t all that white. He looks as if he’s bouncing with energy, but somehow I don’t quite get the same impression of anxiety and urgency that I do with some other illustrators. Somehow, even though he’s wearing a frock coat he doesn’t come across as quite as dapper as others we’ve seen.

That Sketchbook Honeymoon Period

Life can provide many small pleasures. Getting to work in a new sketchbook is one of them for me. There’s nothing quite like watching your new book start to fill with your drawings. In the last couple of days I’ve made some copies of Alice illustrations by New Zealander Harry Rountree. If you look on my links on the right and click on Alice in Wonderland Illustrations it will take you to all of the copies I’ve made of illustrations by many illustrators and you and read a bit more about Harry Rountree and what I like about his work.

Latest sketches in my new Royal Talens 21x13 Sketching Journal 

Of course, the thing is that while I go through a honeymoon period with my latest sketchbook, it does mean I tend to neglect the others. As a result I have a lot of unused and only partially used sketchbooks. I’m better at keeping an A4 book in reserves until I’ve finished my current one – since Christmas 2023 I’ve filled four A4 books. But my smaller sketching journals, not so much. For example, only last week I took an unfinished Moleskine 21x13 sketching journal which has been relegated from travel duties, and I made a copy of a Mervyn Peake drawing in it. Enjoyed doing it too. I also made half a dozen sketches in my newly bought Royal Talens 9x13cm journal. Well, since opening my new Royal Talens 21x13com journal they are both back in the bag now! Sorry boys, but I’ll come back to you, I promise.

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Coming back to Alice illustrations it occurred to me over he weekend that making my own Alice illustrations might be an idea. Only the thing is that I’ve tried this in the past and I hated my results. I know that I cannot compare with the great illustrators who have illustrated the books in the past. But I can’t help comparing myself, and of course I come up short.

So then it occurred to me – well, you’ll have to write your own Alice story, then you won’t have to compare it to anyone’s work. And the thing is that the bare bones of a story have occurred to me. Not necessarily a novel length story – almost certainly not. In terms of writing it, it’s very daunting when you consider Lewis Carroll’s style, his copious use of puns , the importance of poetry in the two Alice books and other things. But in terms of plotting, structuring it’s not necessarily that difficult. To me both books are essentially picaresque. (For the uninitiated this means that the plot concerns the main protagonist making their way through a series of adventures, encounters and situations that are largely independent of each other). Even though ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ which has the overall story arc of Alice progressing across the ‘board’ trying to become a Queen by reaching the end., is still a set of largely unconnected encounters. In a way it’s almost like a music hall variety bill – the Master of Ceremonies, Carroll himself, introduces a character or group of character – they take the stage – they do their party piece – they leave. The order in which they do so doesn’t matter anything like as much as you might think.

Which is why I have been able to conceive such a little set piece scene, which can slot into my story at some part of it. It involves one of the characters ‘on stage’ reciting a nonsense poem that I’ve written about a Mammoth and an Elephant. The next step is to illustrate it. I’m going to begin later today, and if anything comes of it, I’ll tell you all about it.

Royal Talens Art Creation - 21x13cm

Yeah, I know, this is getting a little out of hand. So, let’s recap. You know that I bought a Royal Talens Art Creations sketchbook – portrait 9x14cm which arrived on Wednesday? I did like it a lot, and I’ve already made half a dozen sketches in it, all copies of some of Mervyn Peake’s simpler illustrations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Okay.

Yesterday I fulfilled a very short notice commission. It was a one-off detailed pen and ink drawing for a birthday present and it involved five hours’ work. Thankfully the client was delighted – and let’s be honest, I was very pleased with myself as well. It capped off a great day. I mentioned in the previous post that I have recently retired from teaching. I’ll have my teacher’s pension, but in order to cushion the drop in income I’ve taken a temporary job, and yesterday I went in to meet the team I’ll be part of. They were great and I’ll be honest, I just can’t wait to start in a couple of weeks. So I’m sure you get the point – I was feeling happy and satisfied with myself yesterday evening.

Well, that can be a dangerous state to be in. In the couple of days I’ve had my Royal Talens book I’ve been thinking about buying the larger 21x13cm sketchbook. Last night, to reward myself I bought one from Amazon as a present. I did a little bit of research and found out that Royal Talens is a Dutch company, founded in Apeldoorn in 1899. They were just Talens then, until Queen Wilhelmina, obviously a fan, gave them the designation Royal in 1949.

Now, here’s a funny thing. A lot of travel sketchbook manufacturers seem to follow Henry Ford’s dictum of – you can have it any colour you like as long as it’s black.- He was talking about the Model T, which did eventually come in a range of colours, but you know what I mean. Well, not so Royal Talens. I was just about to click to buy a black one when I noticed that the coral-coloured book – exactly the same as the black one in every other way apart from the colour of the covers – was being sold for a pound less than Amazon were selling the black book. All I can guess is that the coral pink version does not sell as well as the black, light blue, green or yellow – which are other colours I’ve noticed that Royal Talens do. Well, look, I have never made a secret of the fact that I am a cheapskate of many years’ standing and my Scottish ancestors would never forgive me if I passed up the chance of saving a mickle in this way.

Royal Talens 21x13 Portrait sketchbook (left) alongside Moleskine equivalent. Spot the difference apart from the colour.

Actually it’s no hardship opting for this colour – it certainly marks it out as different from the Moleskine for example. I use Moleskine for comparison because in terms of physical dimensions this is very, very similar to a Moleskine. Even being a different colour these look very, very similar in most other ways. Even the matte finish of the covers feels similar – maybe the Royal Talens is smoother, but there’s nothing in it really. The paper inside, as we saw with my smaller RT sketchbook is of a very similar ivory tint to the Moleskine. It’s thinner, at 140 gsm to the Moleskine’s 165 gsm, but it’s hardly noticeable to the touch.

The most obvious difference between this Royal Talens sketching journal and other products competing for the same market like Moleskine and Seawhite is that there’s no document pocket at the back. I mean, this is not a huge thing. I like having the document pockets and they do come in handy when I’m travelling around. But it’s not really a deal breaker for me. If I wanted to I could glue a home-made pocket onto the back cover. But if the good people at Royal Talens were to ask me for my opinion I’d tell them it’s just a shame that this one omission makes their journal just slightly less appealing than it would have been.

This is not a review as such, since the new book only arrived this afternoon, and I’ve only had time to make 1 sketch in it. I haven’t tried watercolour on it yet, and I haven’t taken it out on the road yet either. Well, that’ll come and then we’ll be able to see where it ranks against Moleskine, Amazon Basics and Seawhite of Brighton.

Oh, that sketch? Right. Well, you know how I’ve returned to making my own copies of illustrations of Alice in Wonderland that I really like? I’ve made 6 copies of simpler Mervyn Peake illustrations in the little RT book, 1 copy of a simpler Mervyn Peake, 1 Ralph Steadman and 1 Charles Robinson in the Moleskine. In order to christen the new book I decided to have a go at one of Mervyn Peake’s much more complicated and detailed illustrations, which accompanies the chapter ‘Wool and Water’ in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’. It’s just the first sketch in the book, but I was pleased with the results. It’s a pleasant surface to draw on, just like the smaller RT book. There’s no show through on the other side at all.

Close up of the sketch

Like I said, this is not a definitive verdict yet, but I’ll post again about it when I’ve really put it through its paces.