Sketchbook Explorations is a new series of short (under 10 min.) videos describing warm-up exercises or explorations that you can do on a sketchbook page, or with whatever paper you have. They focus on processes and aren't meant to be finished art pieces.
Here is a warm-up exercise you can do on one page in your sketchbook. I made a grid of nine squares and then played around with wet-on-wet technique with different watercolors and ink. "Wet-on-wet" is when you let different pigments mix together on the paper while they are still wet, or when you apply layers of wet paint to already wet paint on the page. You can get so many cool effects and it is fun to see the way different pigments and media interact.
I am still new to the process and promise that I won’t make a vertical formatted video again. Thanks for bearing with me as I learn!
Materials:
Sketchbook or mixed media/ watercolor paper
watercolor paint and sumi ink (use what you have and experiment!)
brushes
water
towel
Watercolor paint I used:
Natural pigment's by Greenleaf and Blueberry: Malachite and Magnetite colors
Qor Watercolors: Ultramarine Blue and Cobalt Teal
Music: UpUpUp and Over by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue) All other content (c) Kristin Link 2020
Share your work using #SketchingwithKristin on Instagram
Visual Vocabulary - digging deeper
This exercise can simply be a way to get comfortable working with watercolor, to test out paints and pigments, and to see how things interact in a wet environment. For me, it was also a way to explore my visual vocabulary. The concept of “visual vocabulary” was introduced to me by my teacher Jenny Keller in our Intro to Field Sketching class which was part of the Science Illustration Certificate Program I attended. Jenny explained a purpose for practicing field sketching is to build visual vocabulary, or an artist’s collections of marks on the page used to translate what she observes from life into a picture. I find that practicing drawing from life helps me to infuse drawings from photo references with more of a life-like quality, because that visual vocabulary and practice is in my muscle memory. It can also be useful for finding new ways to sketch something, even when that wasn’t intended. Say you sit down and try to draw moving water, but it actually looks more like tree bark, well then you now have the vocabulary to draw tree bark in the future.
Danielle Krysa, the Jealous Curator, also mentions visual vocabulary on her podcast, Art for Your Ear, which I have been listening to for years in my studio. She encourages artists to ask themselves what their marks, color choices, and image vocabulary mean. Artists are innately drawn to certain color schemes or imagery but don’t always stop and wonder why. Once one does sit down to journal or think about the significance of those things, they can discover more meaning behind their work. If you’re interested in delving more into this, I highly recommend listening to the intro to this podcast, where Danielle talks more about her own journey and encourages artists to keep a journal, list, or sketchbook exploring their own visual vocabulary. I have found that once I began this process more insights and connections came to me, because the process has been in the back of my mind.
This year I’ve been thinking about my own visual vocabulary, and I’ve especially been focusing on marks. I’ve been thinking about what marks I like to make in my own work, what my hand likes to do, and also looking at other people’s art and identifying what marks they are making and how they speak to me. One thing I love is these very washy backgrounds where colors and pigments blend into each other, for example, a lot of the work by the Toronto Ink Company. I love the way it draws ones attention to the physicality of the material but also feels abstract and ethereal at the same time. That is what inspired me to do this exercise in wet on wet washes, using materials I have on hand, though I plan to dive into making my own ink from natural materials too (that’s another blog post).
I made a couple of sheets like this and like the sketchbook page, I share in my movie. I’ve actually made a ton of these sheets and pages, and I love it every time. I think something that is so satisfying is that I am scratching a deep creative itch based on the quest for my own visual vocabulary.
I also took some of those pages on the ferry and sketched little landscapes on top using brush pens and colored pencils:
Thanks for reading along to the end. I hope this gives you some ideas for playing around in your sketchbook, trying these wet-on-wet washes, and exploring your own visual vocabulary.
These are hard times and I am offering these video classes for free because I want them to be accessible to all. However if you have the ability and found this content helpful a small donation is welcome. You can use Paypal.me or Venmo me @linkkristin. You can also leave a comment or share these posts with others who you think will appreciate them. Thank you!