Sketchbook Project III

One of the biggest problems when working into a new sketchbook is that new bright white page... so unspoilt, so precious! And so you will often be told to colour the pages first to make them less intimidating. Good advice... but then what? One of the things you can do is to paint onto the coloured page with diluted bleach which removes the colour. These pages were washed with Kohinoor ink first. Take care when using the bleach not to splash your clothes and never use good brushes. Even if you wash them thoroughly they will rot.

When the bleach is dry, you can then draw into the bleached images. Think of this as making marks and lines on your page rather than trying to make that perfect drawing. Also think about what media you use to draw with - I'm using a biro - something that is often overlooked. You do not need expensive pens!

Keep working into the drawings until you are happy with the result.

If you want to take things further and add interest to your sketchbook you can stitch into your pages and tear back the edges like Frances Pickering does with her beautiful books.

By using weaker dilutions of bleach you can achieve more subtle effects such as these.

Again these have been worked into with biro using only a bare minimum of line. You do not have to spend hours to achieve interesting results.

And don't forget to keep your source material close to hand. There is no substitute for actually looking and trying to record what you see.

Although I'm doing these sketchbook project posts for the benefit of my new textile group it's also been fun to see various bloggers taking up the sketchbook challenge. Take a look at some of these:

Textile Trials, Tizduster, Just a Thimbleful and Scented Sweetpeas