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).