Everyday Sketching and Drawing: Five Steps to a Unique and Personal Sketchbook Habit - Softcover

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Steven B. Reddy teaches drawing and illustration at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. He has also taught for the Seattle Public Schools since 1998. Reddy has a passion for creating detailed illustrations of urban scenes, cluttered interiors, and complex still lifes on location in ink and watercolor. His drawings from China and Mexico appear in Danny Gregory's An Illustrated Journey. Reddy also self-published Now Where Was I? An Illustrated Memoir, which showcases drawings that span 35 years from his daily sketchbook diaries.

Gary Faigin trained at the Art Students League of New York and at the École Nationale Supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. He has taught at the National Academy School of Design and at Parsons School of Design; currently he is the artistic director of the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, which he also co-founded. He's the best-selling author of The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expressions, an art instruction classic.

Stephanie Bower is an architectural illustrator, workshop instructor, blog correspondent for Seattle Urban Sketchers, and author of The Urban Sketching Handbook: Understanding Perspective.

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Everyday Sketching and Drawing offers an easy-to-follow, 5-step formula, which teaches beginner-friendly techniques for learning the skills necessary to make drawing and sketching an everyday habit.

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MATERIALS: IT’S NOT ABOUT THE PEN
 
“Oh, please do not ask me about what paints I use and which brushes I like! The art materials don't matter because art is all about relationships and harmony, which can be achieved with any paints. What matters is how you use the materials.”
—Aleksander Titovets
 
A lot can be written about tools and materials and still only scratch the surface of your options. A visit to any art supply store can quickly become overwhelming. Just when you get accustomed to a sketchbook or brand of ink, manufacturers discontinue your favorite products and art supply stores change their inventory.
           
I sketch with friends who build custom, portable travel kits out of Altoid tins and film canisters. They “MacGyver” ingenious devices for holding inks and watercolors to the edge of sketchbooks as they draw. They chat about technical pens, brands of watercolor, and the advantages of different weights of paper. They create complex charts comparing watercolor brands and build detailed graphs of pens and inks.
 
My own materials haven’t changed much over the years, evolving only gradually on a need-to-grow basis. I’m less interested in tools than in helpful ways of seeing. The artistic principles and elements I mull over while drawing would be the same if I were scratching contour lines in sand with a stick: focus on the scene with the goal of understanding the objects and their relationships and translate them into drawings, whatever the tools. I want my drawings to say, “Look at this. We pass by or handle these objects every day until they become invisible and taken for granted. But look how interesting they are!”

What’s in My Bag
It helps to keep your materials simple and compact. My preferred instruments are commonly found in office supply stores or are easily ordered online. With unwieldy requirements you may be hesitant to head out. Even worse is to arrive on location and realize you’ve forgotten your “special” brushes or sketchbook. With a lightweight satchel or backpack always ready to go, you’ll have fewer obstacles to keep you from diving in.
 
Here is a complete list of my favorite tools and materials. They are dependable and well-suited to the techniques described in the following chapters.
 
Paper
When I began sketchbook journaling, I used cheap, student-grade sketchbooks with thin nonabsorbent paper that wrinkled if I applied washes. They were the cheapest books available, and because I drew for my eyes only, it didn’t matter to me that the books should last. In the margins of those early books are to-do lists, phone numbers, drafts of school assignments, and rambling diary entries. If someone asked to see them, I felt a need to read over his shoulder, ready to flip quickly past pages of sentimentality, ill-formed fantasies, regrets, and obsessions.
 
But when sketching became a daily habit and I began to take drawing more seriously, I wanted more robust paper. India ink washes and watercolors require heavier paper that can hold several layers of wet media. I no longer use my sketchbooks for to-do lists, financial calculations, and fretful midnight worries. Although some sketchbook journalists incorporate text with interesting results, I have separate, lined notebooks for all that.
 
The best paper for working with pen, ink, and watercolor is cold-press multi-purpose (or all-purpose) paper, which is a cross between watercolor paper and drawing paper. On coarse watercolor paper, the sharp nib of a pen will pull up the fibers and the line may skip and stutter across the rough paper surface. Smooth, hot-press drawing paper takes too long to dry and will not absorb the many ink washes and watercolor layers that I apply.
 
After experimenting with different sketchbooks and paper, I prefer Canson Montval All-Purpose spiral sketchbooks and buy them in bulk from my local art supply store. This paper is the perfect blend of absorbency and smoothness. I pull out the spiral bindings and replace them with three or four one-inch binder rings because otherwise the edge of the drawing near the binding won’t lay flat on a scanner’s glass plate, causing the drawing to be out of focus. The rings are easy to unsnap, so pages can be removed and scanned flat. The binder rings also allow me to swap pages and organize sketchbooks by subject. I have books that contain, for example, only still lifes, exteriors, or diary comics.

Pencils
It can be a challenge to give up a dependence on pencils and erasers but liberating when you do. The minimal pencil work we’ll do will be quick and gestural and erased all at once when we finish inking. Soft leads such as a 2B or softer are easier to erase. Pencils without erasers will help you avoid the temptation to tighten up and become too fussy from the start. If you use a mechanical pencil you won’t need a sharpener, but broken leads and mechanical glitches can be distracting nuisances when you’re in the flow of a drawing. I like Kimberly 2B pencils by General Pencil, but I’ve borrowed pencils from baristas and grocery clerks in a pinch and it’s made no difference.
 
Erasers
Kneaded erasers are soft, last a long time, and can be pulled apart into smaller sizes. (Once, while I was sketching in Acapulco, a group of local kids gathered around to watch. I gave each of them paper from my sketchbook and tore my eraser into smaller pieces for them to share.) Pink erasers dry out and leave streaks on your drawing. Vigorous rubbing wears down your paper’s tooth. I like the kneaded erasers by Prismacolor.
 
Drawing pens 
I prefer to draw with a pen because I’m a neatnik. Graphite smears. Pastels leave colored dust on everything. Oil and acrylic need to be washed out of brushes. Drawing directly with a pen helps me be more direct and decisive. When signing a document, we don’t fussily correct our signatures, and a drawing can be as personal and direct as signing your name.
 
The workhorse of my technique is the easy-to-find and inexpensive Uni-ball Vision pen. I buy them in bulk at office supply stores. They can even be found in some drug and convenience stores. I use the “fine” (.07) point for contours and the “micro” (.05) point for smaller details and hatching. The ink is completely waterproof and quick drying, which is essential for applying washes and watercolor layers over the ink lines. If you try other pens, choose carefully! There are many “waterproof” pens that are merely water resistant. Test them before committing to a long sketch by drawing a few lines and then brushing clean water across them (or just trying to smear the ink with a wet finger).
 
An advantage of the Uni-ball Vision pen is that the line width is uniform and consistent. A disadvantage of the pen is that the line width is uniform and consistent! Pressing harder or softer will not vary the line width, so it is not as expressive as a brush pen or dip pen with a flexible nib. However, there are ways to achieve an expressive and varied line width, which we’ll go over in later chapters. Many of my sketching friends love Micron pens, which come in many widths and colors. I find the Micron has to be held perpendicular to the page, much like a technical pen, which is not my natural grip. I suggest you try them out for yourself.

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Demonstration: Still Life with Lightbulb

 
 Step 1: Loose pencil guides 
Use a soft pencil to lightly...