A June Watercolor Sketchbook

Studio still life with a painting of Thingvellir by Kjarval. A recent fairly loose watercolor; I want to do more painting like this.

About a month ago, I read about an online watercolor challenge happening in the month of June. The idea is to paint 30 "direct" watercolors in 30 days -- that means painting without preliminary ink drawing, just plunging in and painting or drawing rapidly with your brush. his is the second year for this challenge, the brainchild of Marc Taro Holmes, a well-known "urban sketcher" who used to work in the video game industry, and now happens to live in Montreal, and Liz Steel, an urban-sketcher and watercolor teacher  known for her watercolors of architecture. The point of the month-long challenge is to encourage lots of painting practice and less thinking and worrying about picky details or great results; like life drawing, this is to get people loosened up and moving from one painting to the next without judging themselves. I'm totally in support of that, because what I see in so many people who tell me they'd love to paint is fear of beginning, and then a whole lot of self-criticism which boils down to "I'm no good at this." There's no way someone isn't going to learn and improve if they paint 30 sheets of paper in a month, while just one a week, or one a month, leaves a lot of room for those self-defeating thoughts.

I kept thinking about the challenge, and finally decided I wanted to participate. The experience of doing my Lisbon sketchbook has taught me a lot. I've still got two pages left to go in that book, but by eliminating the ink lines about halfway through I've ended up with sketches I liked much more. And I really liked the fact that it's a complete book.

As for the "rules" of this challenge, I'm probably going to bend them. I'm in a different position from a beginning painter; learning to draw with a brush isn't my personal challenge; it's to pursue the work on a daily basis, sometimes painting very freely, at other times with more detail. At this point what I'm interested in doing is painting better (and more) watercolors, toward a particular style. Sometimes that means I need a quick preliminary pencil under-drawing -- so while I may sometimes go directly to watercolor, I'm not going to force myself to eliminate pencil drawing on every page. However, speed is going to dictate a certain amount of looseness, and that's always good for me.

Because I wasn't satisfied with the paper in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook, I decided to make myself a new sketchbook for June. I used a single sheet of 22" x 30" Arches cold-pressed paper given to me recently by a friend. It's the lightest watercolor weight, 90 pounds, but still substantial. I cut it into smaller sheets that were 10" x 7 1/4", which folded down into 5" x 7 1/4" pages. The one sheet of Arches yielded three signatures of 12 pages each, for a book of 36 single pages, or 18 spreads. I made a traditional sewn binding on linen tapes, with cover boards made of acid-free matboard, covered with Italian marbled paper from my paper stash, added black Canson endpapers, and a spine covered with black leather. 

I wasn't sure how it would work, because I'd never made a book with such heavy paper. The only technical problem was that I didn't sew the signatures quite tightly enough, so even after gluing there is a small gap between them when you open the book to those pages.  But otherwise, it came out well.

The big challenge, I knew, would be to actually USE it. My own inner voice was already saying, "You're going to ruin that beautiful little book!" But I told myself I could make others, and on June 1, the same day I finished the binding, I painted the opening page. 

My goal isn't to do 30 watercolors, necessarily, since I don't have a 60-page book; what I hope to do is to completely fill this sketchbook with sketches and paintings from the area around my studio, which is near the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks. (We'll see what happens -- already it's June 3 and I've only done one painting!) I was shocked when I first put my brush on the Arches paper -- even though I've used hundreds of sheets of it in the past, I had become so used to using the Moleskine paper that the extra "tooth" and receptive surface felt like a wall of resistance, when really the high-quality paper was just begging for more water and paint. I'm not sure what will happen to the book itself when I get this paper really wet -- unlike a block of watercolor paper, the pages will ripple and buckle. But as a teacher once said, "Sometimes you just have to fight with it." At the end of June, I hope I'll have an interesting book full of paintings, and that I will have learned some more things. And you know what? If it's the end of July, that's OK too.

 

Comments

[Natalie]

I'm tempted to take on this challenge even though I've got a lot more urgent work to do at present and also a close friend visiting for another couple of days. Would mean doing 6 or 8 waterecolours to catch up then on with the test. We'll see. maybe. Love yours, Beth.

[Peter]

I’m very interested to see how you’ll tackle this urban challenge. My impression of the scruffy Cleveland streets I used to commute on was one of textures - Old paint, worn brick, discarded tools, furniture, and so on, that lends itsel to a scribble of pen and ink. But I’m nearsighted and always have been a fan of detail. Mainly, have fun!