Just add Water, Silly.: First Time Homework & A Tool Rundown

Well, I'm really loving Sketchbook Skool and I'd heartily recommend it to anyone who's been sitting on the fence not knowing whether it's worth the $99 it costs. Let me tell you, I have little to no money to waste, I'm not plush in funds but I intend to take the next Klass, "Seeing" after I finish "Beginnings". I've taken very few classes in my life but I can't believe just how helpful the first week of the Klass has been. Danny Gregory teaches the first week and I feel so encouraged. Being able to see into the sketchbooks of an artist I admire is invaluable just in it's inspirational work let alone the advice given by Danny on top of that.

Lime coffee cup (Click to Enlarge)

The Homework assignment was to choose something that has meaning to you and draw it. Danny did a demonstration using his son's shoes and encouraged us to only use pen, NO PENCIL. Now that's daunting for me, I'm a diehard pencil user and have never been able to switch over to pencil-free work. It will be a struggle to do this but throughout this week, as I add sketch after sketch to my moleskine cahier sketchbook, I will endeavor to sketch my day-to-day life with ONLY pen. I think my heart beat just increased ten fold. ;o)

About the tools I'll be using: I have a large selection of black waterproof pens, if you know me at all you know I LOVE art supplies and have, over the years, collected a bunch of pens. I'll be using Sakura Pigma Micron pens in 01, 05 and 08 (these are my goto pens, I buy a dozen at a time so I always have a great black waterproof pen), Pilot Multiball (fine point) black pen (I used this one to do all the writing on the page to the left, great pen, dries fast so my left handed writing doesn't smudge.), Stay Anywhere Permanent Pen by Micador (1mm) and a 0.25 Pentel Slicci black pen for seriously small details. I don't know if the Slicci is waterproof but I don't intend to use water media over or under it so we're safe there.

In my cahier I'll be doing mostly sketch work, trying to document my life as it goes by. My intention is to use multiple kinds of black pens but only add white (from my new Sharpie water-based white pen) and a very minimal color with watercolor pencils (not sure if I'll add color at all, actually). I want to stay true to what Danny's trying to teach, be graphic, unafraid of the line you put down and to do it in PEN.

I'm also using two different sizes of Moleskine watercolor sketchbooks. The smaller 5"x8" and the larger 8.5"x12". I love the smaller watercolor Moleskine best, it's landscape orientation (in both sizes) allows for longer drawings and it's the perfect size for travel making it exactly what I need. The paper is so superior. I can throw so much water media at it and the pages just don't buckle. If any page gets any wave to it at all I just close it after it dries and the page flattens but this really doesn't happen at all. I did my first homework in the larger Moleskine because I wanted a large double layout to write a bunch of stuff so I needed the space, lol.

I drew and painted my Salty Chicken. We've had this trivet in the house since I was a young child. Over dozens of houses and many years she's been used for many things including a hot pot holder a decoration, a spoon rest, a dust collector and a salt grinder trivet. The last thing we used her for gave her her unusual name. The salt grinder would leak every time you put it down on the trivet so over the weeks our chicken became covered in a mound of salt! Now she sits on my desk and holds my green coffee cup. Ahh, there's nothing better than a good cuppa sitting on my trusty salty chicken. I have very few things from my childhood so the salty chicken is precious. She's a good girl and heartily does her job protecting the furniture from hot things. Below is the photo I took of her (TOP) and my rendering I did in my large moleskine (BOTTOM).

It's so nice to be back blogging about ART. I'm looking forward to making a happy job of filling my sketchbooks in the coming six weeks of Klass. See you soon, K? Oh, and come join me in "Beginnings", I think you can still join, we're only a few days in and it'll be easy to catch up!!
Best,