Gouache on toned paper and blooming san pedro cactus.

The other day I found a blooming san pedro cactus - It was over 6 feet tall and had dozens of flowers (mostly closed during the day).

I had just a few minutes but toned paper allows me to paint with gouache very quickly.

Wonderful Nova paper from Stillman & Birn is now my standing choice for the toned paper and I had some black pages tucked with my pocket gouache kit.

Later at home I taped the sketch in my main sketchbook with some washi tape and added a protective layer.

I often add a layer of tracing paper over my gouache sketches because of two reasons: it protects the sketch and also semi-transparent surface allows me to have a second take on the composition or just plain doodle some more over existing sketch - in this case I drew a few flowers with a brush marker.

Pocket gouache

This is a note to myself - to record what gouache kit I took with me to the island trip at the beginning of the summer and how I changed the colors after.

Note: adding a drop of gum arabic to the dry paint when topping it off worked very well - even for crumbly colors like Alizarin Crimson.

And here is how I felt about some of the colors after the trip and a month of daily gouaches in June (read the names of the colors) and how I started thinking about changing colors.

Resulting in this palette - which is currently sitting in my bag.

Right now this pocket gouache solution works really great!
I only wish I found a collapsible flat brush to carry with me.

How I store my sketchbooks (now).

I recently changed the way I store my old sketchbooks. Before this change, I had a large box on top of another large box with some more sketchbooks piled on top of those. But it was impossible to take a look at old sketchbooks. And it was getting harder and harder to add new ones to the pile without ruining the whole structure. 

So I got them all out, decided to keep the oldest 50 or so in the box and the rest are on the shelves - easy to pull and flip through by me or a guest. (Took me two days - mostly because of all the memories I wanted to refresh by looking at my sketches).

A story of one hyacinth

Last spring I got a bulb of hyacinth at the store and drew it in my sketchbook. I followed it's growth and all kinds of changes - from new smells to a nasty fall. I used all kinds of materials. And then I left for a trip and did not have a chance to draw the last part of this flower's journey. 

But I hope to see it's offspring next year.

Sketchbook 120

I like my blog.

I wrote a post at the end of 2018 about how I will change my relationship with it. Over 6 month later I have 20 posts and a large backlog of things I want to blog about backed by hundreds of sketches.

I kept skipping some weeks of posting by using a simpler instant gratification of instagram which automatically posts to facebook. A few clicks and I am done. But not satisfied.

I like my blog because I can search for things here and can look at them in the order that I created these posts and see all of them and not what some computer picked to keep people looking at the screen longer. I can see a bigger picture and how my works and interests evolve.

So I devised yet another strategy to keep myself on the topic here. But first - a little bit of catching up and some announcements and explanations are due :)

Some of my projects will have to be hidden from the public eye from now on, some subjects will disappear completely (or almost completely) and some will be more open. I will keep fuller and organized folders with the sketchbook pages (those that I want to share publicly) on my Flickr. But I will add links to the folders in the posts here.

And I will continue this journal of my journaling :)

Here is a quick screenshot of the sketchbook 120.