Sand on my scanner

Hi! I’ve been absent for a few weeks, on a family holiday in Crete. I’ve missed writing, but since it was a family holiday, I wanted to be fully present for whatever activities everyone wanted to do. It turned out that there was a lot of time spent sitting on various beaches, which is where I spent most of my drawing time. It’s also the reason that when I opened my sketchbook to scan my sketches, a whole pile of sand fell out.

With all this beach time on my hands, I had the opportunity to change the way I work. I didn’t use my big sketchbook, I hardly used good brushes at all, and I tried some new materials too! It was great to mix things up a bit.

Early on in the holiday I decided that I would focus on drawing people. I hardly ever get the opportunity to do this, and isn’t the beach the perfect place? There are lots of exposed body parts, people hold their poses for a long time, and there’s a variety of ages and sizes of the models.

Since I didn’t want to get my sable brushes full of sand, nor did I want to juggle water containers, I used a water brush most of the time. It’s not the most precise of tools, but it gets the job done. And as the week went on, I got a little better at using it and began to appreciate how my already small sketch kit could be reduced even further. These were done in a Hahnemuhle cotton sketchbook, 8″ x 5″ size. It was the perfect size to fit in my beach bag next to my sunscreen and towel. And once I clean the sand off my scanner, I’ll post some more of my beach sketches.