Are you creative?
If you love art, you should start sketching. Spring and summer are the best seasons to start, then, by the fall, you can already paint. While many people are specializing and trying to be experts in just one area of life, it is great to maintain some universality and balance. Adding creativity to daily routine changes everything for the better.
Being artistic
Being universal might not be that easy because everything has many aspects, whether it is art, writing and literature, music, or theater and dance. I still believe we need variety of uplifting things that make us more human and sensitive to happiness, sadness, joys and troubles of life. Art does that. It opens up one’s soul and redirects thoughts towards something unique, unexpected and beautiful.
New skills, new habits, new perception
We freshen up our life and bring something new into it. Why not sketching and drawing? These are the first steps towards painting and drawing. Sketches look great either small or big. The small ones we can use in art journals. The big ones can be framed or simply hang onto wall.
Adding visual images to your thoughts or at least having visual images in your head gives one’s life more color, more brightness and vitality.
My journey
Sketching and drawing are the areas I have explored since early childhood. I did not have a good paper or good pencils and pens, but I had a huge desire to capture everything around me. The urge to turn visual scenes into sketch or drawing was so intense that I would draw during school lessons and later at University lectures. I had drawn lots and lots of portraits of my class and school mates, as well as of my family and friends. When I was outdoors, I was sketching and drawing garden, streets, buildings, plants and flowers: anything, really.
Sketching supplies and what makes it easy
Sketching is much faster than, for instance, acrylic painting or even watercolor or pastel painting. It is a convenient genre to take outside because we do not need much: just paper, pencil or pen. It can be done with adding a little bit of watercolor. It can be done in pencil, watercolor pencils or pastels.
Using good art supplies
I never use paper which is called sketching paper and is supposed to work well for sketching. It is too thin to add paint, and tears and smudges very easily. Use of paper also depends on the purpose of your sketch. If it is just a quick reminder of a scene, sure, anything will do. I use for sketching watercolor paper that is a grade below the best watercolor papers which are heavy Arches and Saunders-Waterford papers.
Pen outlines
Pen works and looks better on smooth surfaces. Watercolor marker paper was available a while ago, I haven’t seen it recently in our local art store. That was excellent paper for pen drawing, and I do not have or use watercolor markers. I have watercolor pencils. That is a slow way of developing watercolor painting; however, it does the job for people who are very comfortable with pencil and not with brush.
Try not using eraser
I would advise also not to use eraser until the subject has gotten some shape. Otherwise, one just keeps erasing without achieving any results. Focus and draw, trust your eyes, think about contrast, composition, values and effects, and not that much about perfect drawing. You can adjust it any time. Forgetting eraser at home when you go out sketching, will increase focus.
Old countryside house in pen and watercolor, 18 x 12 in or 46 x 30.5 cm
Million reasons to start sketching, drawing or illustrating:
if you are alone, but do not want to feel lonely;
if you have hard times getting the me-time and letting it all go;
if you are facing issues that affect your life badly and you want to escape them for a while;
if you are young or old, but do not want to spend all leisure time in front of a screen;
if you would love to develop a habit that helps getting rid of addictions;
if you feel that your memory is worsening and you want to sharpen it up;
if that is your dream, but you never got to it;
if you want beauty in your life and art on every wall;
go ahead and start sketching and drawing.
There is no better time than spring and no better place than outdoors to start sketching or painting.
Rocks and water, size, 22 x 15 in or 56 x 38 cm
On this large test watercolor painting, I explored a new masking technique. This painting was simply a test whether packaging tape works as a masking tool. It does. I cut around with X-Acto knife and, yes, it really works better than any masking fluid. However, it is applicable only to large areas, not the tiny ones. So, I kept adding paint, and this testing piece ended up looking like a painting.
Testing colors for a large watercolor painting. Looks great!
Here, I was testing the color combinations and layout for a larger watercolor painting. It looks attractive, yet it is just a pen and watercolor sketch.
Perspective is easy if you know how to proceed. Old buildings make a perfect sketching subject.
These are some of demo paintings done during and for my pen and watercolor classes.
More sketching: https://inesepogagallery.com/2014/03/02/sketching-in-watercolor-whats-the-advantage/