Playing with Color

signed up for another class!  (I feel like I start a lot of posts like this, learning junkie that I am.)

It’s the watercolor course through Liz Steel’s SketchingNow platform.  It will be nice to have some tools for this always surprising medium (as opposed to blindly swiping colors on the page and hoping for something that’s not mud.) 

The best thing?  I’ve finally broken open the Moleskine watercolor journal that I’ve had for a year.  I was afraid of messing up that nice paper!

And what nice paper it is.  I’m testing the Moleskine watercolor journal and a Stillman & Birn Beta journal in tandem.  All while I continue to fill my latest Stillman & Birn Alpha journal.   

The Beta is for watercolor, so the paper is thicker and has more tooth  to it.  It stands up to a lot of water and I’m learning how to be brave about mixing colors right on the page and letting the watercolor do its magical thing.

S&B Beta on the top; Moleskine on the bottom. 

The Alpha paper is thinner, more for ink and light washes.  It tends to buckle, which I kind of like.  It’s still sturdy enough to not pill and fall apart when you add water.  But I think the smoother paper makes it a littler harder to control the water, and the pigment, on the page.  Especially when it has buckled and created peaks and valleys to paint around.

I like the buckling...it tells me my sketchbook has been used!

ixed media journals, like the Alpha, have more pages, so they’re more economical in the long run.  Stillman & Birn offers both in soft covers, so... backpacker friendly! 

The Betas comes in hard and soft cover, too.  Both come in a variety of sizes.   

And the flip side to having a lot of pages in the mixed media journal is, obviously, having fewer pages in the watercolor journals.  To me, that just means I can fill it up more quickly! 

It’s like checking off the days on the calendar that tell me I managed to practice my sketching craft.  A way of keeping score that compels me onward and forward.  I want to keep sketching when I see those completed journals, and checked boxes, adding up!