Yesterday, I started a new sketchbook (Softcover Square Alpha by Stillman and Birn), and I thought it would be a good prompt for a quick blog post!

I’ve been a little busy lately putting together my Travel Sketching course. (This is a massive understatement!) It’s super exciting that after months of preparation, I’m finally sharing the concepts that I’ve developed for this course.

For those of you who have signed up… I hope that you are enjoying my 7 lines technique! Even though this week in the course we are just doing line drawings (without adding colour) I’ve been using this technique in various ways – and used it for this sketch! And yes! I’ll share more about this in the first livestream early next week, so stay tuned!

If you are interested in the course and haven’t yet signed up  – it’s not too late to join – see more here.

But to get back to my recent sketching…

I’ve been loving using the square Alpha lately—so much so that I stocked up (from my friends at LarryPOST), and now I’m set for the rest of the year. Let’s do a quick calculation to see if that’s the case: There are 106 days left in 2024, and earlier in the year, I finished one in 17 days and one in 25 days (see this article for more), so having five sketchbooks will be plenty.

Despite being in the middle of a crazy busy season, I’ve been still sketching local houses regularly. And I’m continuing to use watercolour pencils (my Travel Sketching course colours – see here) and a palette of Arkaar paints. – see here. Note: My everyday palette was cleaned and then used for Travel Sketching course photos and I was still using it as a prop last week.

Some of the Arkaar paints are more opaque than the (mostly) Daniel Smith colours in my normal palette, so some sketches have been more successful than others. 🙂

I’m also still using a waterbrush – but I’m ready to go back to my beloved dagger brush. 🙂

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I’m particularly happy with the shadow under the gable in this sketch. And before you ask for more details… I’m not going to share how I achieved it until I work out exactly what I did. Ha! The fun thing about constantly being in experimentation mode during a busy season is that I often rely on my reflex sketching skills. This means that my brain is focusing more on my tasks for the day and not on my sketch. And as a result, I’m not concentrating exactly on what colours I’m using.

I’ll try to get back to more regular articles here – but long-time readers will know that even when I’m quiet in terms of blog posts, I’m still regularly sketching. 🙂