August 6, 2014 – Africantapestry

Le Pescher is a quaint little village not far from us…when our daughter got married there in 2012, we all walked to our cars through the little village from the church, past the bassin, filled with enormous fish! My sketching for today was the church where they got married(well, only the tower, since I ran out of paper for the rest!) and a house opposite the pond on the route we walked.

..a house across the large pond, bassin..

..the little church of Le Pescher..

I received 2 sketchbooks from Stillman & Birn and did my first watercolor in the Epsilon S&B sketchbook, 150gms. It is really too lightweight for my watercolor, but then it isn’t really meant for watercolor, only for drawing with ink and pen. It is very very smooth with no tooth at all, and I don’t even like it for drawing, for that reason. I like a bit of tooth which grabs a medium, whether it is watercolor or pencil or charcoal or whatever. But it is still early days and I only got started with the book, so there is still time to get used to the paper.

One can see the buckling of the paper, which doesn’t bother me too much, but the watercolor makes hard edges and there is no granulation, something I love in watercolor. It is all very flat and smooth. A sketchbook not fit for watercolor, even though I read comments on internet which convinced me to get it for watercolor sketching.

What is nice about these books is that it folds open without the spiral in the middle, allowing one to paint across two pages if you want to. But if I compare this book to my Daler Rowney, (satin finish, 160gms) that I have been doing the latest sketches in, it totally falls short. I personally prefer the Daler Rowney even with the spiral in the middle.