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Urban Sketching

I’ve had a recent obsession with fountain pens, dip pens, pen and ink, and watercolor sketching. I’ll probably post my thoughts on fountain pen paper later. But all this led me to the world of Urban sketching – which I like because it leans into some of my strengths, namely, playing with ink, being impatient, and accuracy not mattering as much as mood and gesture.

I’ve talked to some friends and we are planning to check out some local Urban Sketch clubs but in the meantime I thought I’d see if my current mixed media sketchbook could handle a little ink/watercolor. This was fun! I decided I liked purple. All the linework is done with purple india ink (although I know it looks black). Paper is Canson XL Mixed Media 160g. It buckled under the wash but dried flat enough again.

I’m also taking a composition class online from an artist I admire. I may post those images here as well eventually. So far we’ve been focusing on ‘going slow’ and ‘being careful’ – my weakness!

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Daily Art – Black and White

In September I decided to restart doing one sketch or painting a day, every day. I get thrown off by life or, specifically, camping sometimes but I’ve been overall good about it and I feel like it’s getting easier with less effort. Half of these are from my own photos, about half from photos on Unsplash and one is a copy of a Georgia O’Keeffe.

Part of what I mean when I say it’s getting easier is that I have fewer obvious failures. This is not everything I did in the month but I didn’t take photos of the stuff that really didn’t work at all – the rate of failure like that has gone down.