There's been a bit of trial and error in selecting the best way to draw onsite. In a perfect world I would have a beautiful set of matching sketchbooks, different sizes and paper, but in reality, different situations required different approaches and so I am left with a mixture.
I began with moleskins, A6 and A5. Light and transportable, they are excellent for carrying all the time. The drawback is the paper has a yellow cast and is slightly translucent, great for authenticity, but not so good for scanning. Muji (the light brown and red-edged) make a really broad range of size and they are really thin, perfect for filling a sketchbook in a morning, so I thought I could make each one location specific. However the paper is absorbent and seems to suck up graphite and colour. It's hard to get a strong tonal contrast with them. I tried A3 photocopy paper, which is actually excellent for scanning pencil drawings - who'd have thought, but obviously too thin for any rough treatment. The white spiral bound book has no provenance I'm afraid, it's white paper is just a bit thicker than photocopy paper and it's great. Small enough to take out for serious drawing, it lays flat and scans beautifully. The very best sketchbooks I have found, I bought in the London Graphic Centre (you can get them online too). These are Leichturm1917 series. Flat, opaque white, smooth paper and the right thickness. I think they are just about perfect - I wish they made spiral bound versions. Stall 51, the plant market. Procreate Ipad It's sometimes necessary to work either swiftly or discreetly and I've discovered that recording colour with my IPad and Procreate is a really good way to get information down. There have been a couple of drawbacks however. The pencil, a '53', has a squashy tip, and although quite responsive, does feel like i'm drawing with my thumbs, so I don't think there is any subtlety of line. The other thing is that my colour palette is huge and so the work I have made digitally doesn't sit with my sketchbook drawing - paint and coloured pencils. To get round this, I have made a palette from existing work and sampled it into Procreate - an easy solution I hope.
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