Last night I stayed up to midnight for a Zoom catchup with some of my USK friends. We sketched some of Jessie Chapman’s beautiful floral arrangements (naturally from photos) – thanks Jessie!

As I had gotten up at 4:30am the same day for a 5am Zoom call, I was super tired! But I did manage to get these three sketches done while catching up with the group. So lovely to see everyone!

Although this was a case of reflex sketching, it was a good opportunity to try some of the colours in my testing palette. And without being really conscious of it, I started to explore some pigment characteristics. The one property that stood out this morning was ‘drying shift’ so as I worked I progressively increased the pigment in my washes to allow for this. The new colours I used in these sketches were Hansa Yellow Medium, Serpentine Genuine, Transparent Orange and Perylene Maroon.

It was great to be able to incorporate a few of the new colours in with ones from my everyday palette (ah! Potter’s Pink features on this page). This mix of old and new colours is a good approach to testing! I look forward to using this new palette more in this way in the coming weeks… and not being quite so tired will help me explore other pigment characteristics in detail. BTW I added a bonus lesson on Pigment Characteristics into my Watercolour course last year and it’s available for anyone who has signed up for it in the past.

Earlier in the week, I posted a flip-through of Sketchbook 146 to Instagram. Click here to watch it.

Lockdown certainly means more sketching and my two projects – sketching a teacup a day and working my way through Palladio’s villas is certainly giving me a great focus.

I’m also gearing up for my Sketchbook Design course and so I’m already starting to be more intentional about the elements I’m adding to my page and the design principles guiding placement of sketches and text. You’ll notice my grid page at the end which helped me establish some consistent margins. More about this inside the course. I can’t wait to go through Sketchbook Design again – click for more details if you want to join us.