Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Moleskine sketch paper and 'color'

There was a little discussion (at Backspace Cafe with Alanna, Kalina, Vicky and me) about the Moleskine Sketch paper not taking to water based color. This was also a hot topic at the Portland Urban Symposium too.
In the past this Moleskine sketchbook has been used for pen drawing only (when using watercolor I use the 'Stonehenge' paper) but I decided to try to color one of my sketches from last Sunday. I used gouache and when used as an opaque color it went on pretty well (and smoothly) but the addition of more water and transparency didn't do the paper and the drawing any favors...it was a struggle and it seeped through to the other side of the paper.

5 comments:

  1. Gouache does work better in these than watercolor, but it's hard to draw a hard line between them (no pun intended). I guess the difficulty isn't that you can't use water in these at all, but that it requires really selecting your tools and methods to suit the paper - and that's only worth it if you like the paper a lot in the first place.

    But in any case - nice drawing, and thanks for the demo!

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  2. Good point Kalina and with that thought in mind I don't see me changing my methods to accommodate it. At least right now.

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  3. From all appearances, you handled the paper and the medium very well!

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  4. i like how you vignetted this drawing. good job with the materials.

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  5. Too bad about the difficult paper, but online this looks great. I really like the composition with the tree, lamppost, and MAX cable through the window.

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