Hello Sailor!

The Sailor Fude pen, as recommended by Mike Daikubara in his book "Sketch Now, think later" is something I was wary of as I had never got on with calligraphy pens.

However, another Reading sketcher Mohan had a 55 degree nib and though I found it tricky to use, I was inspired to buy one.
I bought a 40 degree one which is supposed to better suited to smaller sketches according to online reviews and found that I really like it. All those line widths in just one pen. This has not led to a reduction in pens I still carry.


Here's a selection of some of my initial sketches using the Sailor Fude.

The Reading Sketchers are meeting again at MERL  11am on Sunday December 10, 2017.

Skooling (Expressing klass homework)

Mucking about with Storyboarder

Spotted a retweet by SydneyPadua to an article about a new, free storyboarding tool by WonderUnit called StoryBoarder  and decided to have a play.

I liked the Sketch sprint feature that generates a timelapse - you draw for a set time and it makes that into an animation. But it also reminds me that I need to play with the Slate (via iskn) again and I'm hoping to hook it up to StoryBoarder if possible (next experiment)

But I did play with it and generate an animated gif (just using mousepad and finger to draw very roughly) - it's not very sophisticated but it is quite fast and fun. You can likely spot the mistakes but a bit of practice will help (as with most things).

I decided to keep on adding drawings rather than using the onion layers, grids and the scaling tools in this particular example. However, importing a sketch and then trying to move it 'closer' was hard as I had to effectively move a screen (more to explore there as well).

Sadly, I couldn't find the Shot Generator - but I joined the facebook group to try and see if they can help.
UPDATE: So, it turns out (thanks to someone asking in the Facebook group) that if you scroll down on the right hand side you will get the Shot Generator. It doesn't look as if you can scroll but you can

Sketchbook fright!

In May I first heard about the The sketchbook project 2018  (that you can take part in too till Jan 2018!) on a facebook post (thank you fellow SBSer). I decided this would be an ideal project to do so I bought the pack. After several delays that had me wondering if I had signed up for a scam, it arrived in June and I was so excited I tweeted about my lovely pack and did...

The pack /goodie bag

... absolutely nothing apart from pick it up from time to time, coo and put it back. 

The suggested themes for 2018

Eventually, after a month or two, I wrote the suggested themes down on the back to try and make a start. I also leafed through existing pages to see how they display the books and what seemed to work and what didn't.  I found out a bit more about  The Sketchbook project/Brooklyn Arts Library -a crowdfunded museum that runs several challenges. I wondered if I should have taken part in those instead. There's also a blog.

I did NOTHING else in the book - musing from time to time about the themes (which are merely suggestions that I am not bound by). 

It's September now, two other sketchbooks have been filled and a new one started. I've taken part in two sketching events run by the Reader Sketchers group and I've also taken part in two SketchbookSkool kourses ('Let's Make a Map' and Urban sketching). Still, nothing in this one.

Eventually, today, I gave up and sacrificed the back page to a sample page so I could see which tools I could use (and which I couldn't)

What to avoid:

• Water causes the paper to buckle (not only on the page but also pages behind them). 
• Watercolour markers with water leak into the back and the page behind. 
• Promarkers leak into the back. 

In summary: So nothing with water and nothing with Promarkers.

What works?

• Sharpies, Posca markers and bingo dabbers all work
• Pitt pens work, as do biros, pigma markers (sent with pack) and lamy pen and ink (with VERY LITTLE water) work just fine
• Watercolour brushes, watercolour pens and watercolour pencils (without water) add intense colours. 
• Stamps work just fine.
• Crayons work as you woud expect. There ate traces left of crayoyn on the pages.

Why so scared?
It's normal to be daunted of the blank page in a new sketchbook but I think the reason why this one in particular seemed scary was that it would be on show as a single PIECE of work so I didn't want to waste anything in it. Ordinarily, I am happy to scribble as each sketch is a single drawing that I can choose to ignore or adapt. I'm also fine with people leafing through my sketchbooks, and as mentioned, had completed two since then.

If there's one thing that may have helped, it would have been a couple of sample pages (so you could see what happened to the page behind) as it's not inexpensive to take part in the project.

Now to work out what to do and how to incorporate the buckled pages AND make another start.
After all, I have till Feb/March 2018 (allowing postage time).

Any tips gratefully received.

Same line - different walks.

I joined this Drawing a day with Veronica Lawlor SketchbookSkool course and today is day 1.

The exercise was to"take a line for a walk" (which is from a quote by Paul Klee re drawing).

Now that I have access to the Slate, and I know it records my lines, I would be able to see how my eye moved and see what happened. The Slate records every movement of the pen whilst it is in contact with the paper - and because I drew this as a single line drawing, it would show the correlation between my eye movement and the corresponding pen movement. You can see what I noticed first and what drew my eye next.

I drew this in offline mode and really wanted to add to it:

Original paper drawing: 

 

Slate drawing below:

I changed the background paper using the Slate as I felt it added warmth).

Note: there is no 'brown' colour in the Slate palette, nor any 'fill' but I guess I can import into Gimp for more manipulation. 

Watching how my eye moved...(mp4 lasting 5secs) - this will be interesting generally to watch how I move/see.

I liked my line drawing and wanted to add a splash of colour to it using watercolours (quickly)
You can see how that panned out below

with watercolour

original paper and biro