Sketch & Note

It's always great when you have finished a sketchbook and a new sketchbook is in front of you waiting to be started. It's especially exciting when the new one is a type you haven't used before.

I've just started one of my new Sketch & Note sketchbooks - or rather sketch booklets - by Hahnemühle. They come in bundles of two with colourful covers and 40 pages each. The paper is rather smooth with a fine texture and weighs 125 gsm.

The tools I prefer to work with are pencils, coloured pencils and ink. I do a preliminary drawing with pencil, then go over it with ink, adding also a bit of hatching where necessary, and then colour with coloured pencils. This paper seems to suit all these tools very well. It's smooth enough for good ink lines, but also has enough texture for the coloured pencils. I like to colour rather lightly, not minding some paper white showing through. Though, I'm sure if you want to get rid of it, that won't be a problem with this paper.

Today I felt like drawing a bird. I used a reference photo from pixabay. The little birdie now lives on page 3 of my orange Sketch & Note.

Framed

Normally I draw in sketchbooks. And normally I draw for myself. But with my mother's 80th birthday coming up I thought I'd use my drawing skills to produce a unique present for her. She loves orchids and drawing flowers is fun. So I searched for good pictures of orchids and did one or the other drawing in my sketchbook to practise a bit. Then it was time to do the real thing. I had a nice sheet of Hahnemühle paper left that I used. Today I bought a frame for the drawing and here is my first framed drawing. I hope she'll appreciate it when I present it to her at the end of the month.

Inktober

Inktober is a challenge where you are supposed to do a drawing in ink every day in October. You can find everything about it on inktober.com. There you'll also find a list of prompts for every day. Some people make their own lists for the month.

I've been using ink a lot lately, so this challenge has caught my interest. Though, I don't like the very vague list of prompts and I am not up to the task of doing a drawing every day. But if I don't follow the official rules, I think it's not Inktober, so the challenge has to do without me.

There are more challenges like this over the year, like Every Day in May or World Watercolour Month in summer. What is nice about them is that lots of people draw or paint about the same topic and share what they produce online. It's interesting to see what everyone has done and compare it to what you've come up with - just for fun.