Testing the Seawhite

I’ve been in Worthing for the last few days. My stepfather, who really can’t walk very well now, had a fall and broke some of the bones in his right foot. He’s in hospital. My mother is in her 80s now and doesn’t drive. So, being as I’m off work for the time being and it looks likely that I won’t be returning before my retirement at the end of term I suggested I should come and stay at least for a little while. If there’s nothing else I could do I can drive her back and forward to the hospital.

So I decided to bring my new Seawhite travel sketch book with me and try it out, using it in as close to the same way I’d use a travel sketching journal on a European trip. When I arrived I found that I’d left behind any watercolours, but that’s not the end of the world. I’ve had whole sketching trips go by without touching watercolour in the past. There’s nine sketches in the book now, the London Underground train I showed you previously, a sketch of St. John’s Gate in London and 7 sketches I’ve made in Worthing.

This statue was erected on the seafront in Worthing as a memorial to 'Jumbo' a baby elephant whose body washed up on the beach in 1926.

The Dome Cinema, originally the Kursaal. Well over 100 years old it's one of the oldest working cinemas in the UK.

I said in my previous post about this book that I liked ink sketching in it and that’s absolutely still true. All of the black ink sketches I’ve made so far in the book have been with a uniball 0.1mm fineliner which has worked really well and allowed me to make sketches almost as detailed as those in my A4 sketchbooks. I had a set of 0.4mm Stabilo coloured fineliners with me. The nib is thicker that I like to use – 0.3mm is normally my absolute limit, but I have to say that I’m really rather pleased. I think that the green Triton fountain works really well. The mauve of the elephant statue less so – for some reason the lines in the mauve seem that little bit thicker.

One thing that I have noticed is that the watercolour on my first picture is starting to rub off a little on the inside of the front cover. This may just be because it’s the cover, but if watercolour does this on the inside of the book then I could have a problem. Watch this space, although not for a few days yet.