One Foot After the Other
Wrapped the sketchpad today! I have to clean my place so I'll wait till everything's sorted out before cracking a new one. Truly enjoyed the paper, although in several pages things felt weird. I'm not advanced enough to triage whether it was a paper problem, sizing problem, or technique problem. I think this is the first sketchbook I'd ever had where I could honestly say I like every sheet (or at least they turned out halfway decent), so pretty pleased about that.
I think I'd gotten better at recognizing where I could go looser and how to approximate the colors, which in turn lessen my anxiety. Given that I'm still ranting about fear of wet media as late as the beginning of April, it is a surprise to myself that this sketchpad ends up being 80% watercolor and 20% water-soluble media.
As I grew more confident, I made less "mistakes". When I did, I figured out how to fix, cover, or accept it. In turn, I grew even bolder. If only we step into such virtuous cycle as easily as we are into vicious cycle.
I'm still learning most of these tools. Sometimes I'm baffled because a water-soluble pencil or marker would dissolve completely and spread beautifully on one page but not the other. My sprayer would disperse fine mist one time but drop unsightly blobs the next time. Some part of me is trying to convince me that I should start learning things more formally, the other part says embrace the wild west. We'll see.
While I loosely keep track of the pages I have left as I compose a blog post, I don't actually set a target to achieve. For me, drawing and painting should stay casual, and the pacing is merely a bookmark I leave for myself in the future. After I found my old drawings though, I decided to be just a little bit more diligent. Teenage me signed and dated every picture, which seemed pompous and unnecessary at the time, but it allowed today's me to place everything in a concrete space. This is the fastest sketchbook I finished ever, and I'd attribute that to the fun I have in every page.
In my teenage years, I spent a lot of time drawing in loose A4 and folio sheets because that was what we would use to print schoolworks. I had reams of them stocked. Now I realized that I was trying too much, too big. Every now and then I would fold them in half and bind A5 books for me to take on the go, but I clearly didn't do it enough. I'd been working with A5 and B6 books since I restarted, and suddenly everything felt way more manageable.
While it started as a necessity, I've grown to use the painter's tape as part of the ritual. Whenever I set myself to wind down and start "playing", I would lay down the painter's tape on the four sides of the sketchpad, regardless of my intention to actually paint. I do that even when I use pencils and don't have to worry about wet paints spilling over the spiral binding and contaminate other pages. It's funny how our brain is wired to notice and appreciate patterns.
I don't think I'll ever be interested in miniature paintings requiring me to hunch and work over a magnifying glass, but I've decided that my next sketchbook would be smaller than A5. If I can get comfortable working on around A6 or one of them cute palm-sized squares, that would be nice to bring outside.