The third sketchbook I recieved was themed around seasons. Niki, who started the sketchbook, had began with a winter theme. Beth, who next recieved the book, decided to continue onto a spring theme. This meant when I recieved it, I got to explore the theme of ‘summer’. I love summer, it’s my favourite season of all, and with it being September it was still fresh on my mind, which helped a lot! Beth had introduced her section of the sketchbook with a sort of cover page for spring, and ended on a typography page. I wanted to keep up this theming, so began my 10 pages with a giant sunflower watercolour and the words ‘Summer Lovin” at the bottom.
The sketchbook was an Artway Doodle journal and the paper was soooo beautiful to work on. I loved filling this book so much that I’ve even added it to my wishlist!! It was so easy to sketch, took paint really nicely, and allowed for a lot of layers. My only issue is how the paper reacted to erasers, as it would tear up on contact pretty easily, but this may encourage me to erase less and accept my mistakes more!
My next page I chose to do another watercolour illustration of my favourite year-round (but especially summer) drink – peach iced tea. This was fun but still just sketchy. It really showed me how great this paper is. I decided to illustrate some summer fruits on the next page and used water based markers for this, adding water to them to create some cool effects. This is a new technique I’ve not yet used, and I think I’ll experiment some more with it. I then really wanted to do a page of ice cream, and decided to work on an idea I’d considered for Inktober (which I ended up not participating in). I’m not super happy with the outcome of this page, but again it was a great learning experience.
Niki had drawn some rough sketches of wintery mountain scenes in her section of the sketchbook and Beth had continued these and drawn some springtime mountains. I wanted to keep to the theme so sketched some summer mountain thumbnails too. They don’t show up great on the scan, unfortunately. I then did I two page spread on ‘Christmas in Australia’ taking inspiration from Beth’s ‘Spring in the Southern Hemisphere’ spread. I did intend to put more work into this but left it as sketches to focus on other work instead.
My next two pages were a lot of fun! For the first page I took inspiration from my travel sketchbook which I took to York this summer. I painted a willow tree in my travel sketchbook and wanted to include something similar in this book, too. The pond felt like a natural addition adding to the summery theme and sort of connecting to the wasp on the next page (I definitely associate bugs with ponds!). The wasp was a nice technical challenge. I enjoy drawing insects as I find them quite easy to get ‘right’. I want to do more studies of them, I think! My final page was my typography page, as I include one in every sketchbook. It’s a cute quote, and I like how it fades from sunny yellow into autumnal reds and browns. It was a hard one to settle on though as I wanted something that would add closure to the season of summer and introduce the season of autumn, which meant a lengthy bit of writing!
I had so much fun in this sketchbook, which was refreshing after the art block I had in the last one. I think the paper being so enjoyable to work on, a theme that suited me well, and a little bit less pressure on myself combined to make it a nicer process. I also think I prefer working in smaller sketchbooks, which I’m slowly learning. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next sketchbook holds!
Learning Log 