Sketchercise, Out and About!

Sketchercise, what a great way to get some exercise and do something arty at the same time! Having lugged around large sketchbooks for years, I'm really into the Hähnemühle Watercolour books at the moment, this one is 15cm x 21cm and weighs about 300g. 

If you go out sketching a lot, or you take your sketchbooks on hols, it’s worth giving some thought to your choice.

This one is landscape format which I find very practical, obviously for landscapes and street scenes and if I want to draw a tall building then I just turn it around. My workhorse sketchbooks were Boesner's own, bound, robust and with natural white paper, what I really loved was the fabulous square format (unfortunately not the weight, in this format about 450g) which is scarcely to be found. Stillman and Birn, have now brought out a square format but I believe it has a soft cover which is no use to me. The covers of my sketchbook have to be hard and robust because carting around in bags and cases is tough on sketchbooks and secondly I don’t want to have to take a drawing board (no guarantees that you will find a table either). 

Another feature that is an essential is some kind of method of closure. This sketchbook has a tough piece of elastic, I had tried Canson's Artbook too, it had a magnetic closure but it broke pretty quickly. If the sketchbook doesn’t have a fastener, I find that the pages get dogeared and grubby in your bag. Having found a sketchbook that you like without, you can always make a closure with an elastic band or I find removable bra straps useful here, slip it over the sketchbook and adjust (I'll post a picture of this at some point, to illustrate!). Another feature that is nice is an internal pocket where you can pop dockets, travel tickets or business cards which I collect and stick in my sketchbooks, the Hahnemühle doesn’t have one of these unfortunately. 

As a watercolour book it has fabulous heavyweight paper which I love, regardless of medium I'm using. As you can see I tried something new here in my watercolour sketch, I went for a clean edge or frame around my drawing. Bit of masking tape, thwacked on beforehand but I must say it didn’t peel off as easily as I had hoped so maybe I need to research other possibilities. 

Here is my drawing kit, which all fits into that wee bag, the bag was really a ''find'' (it’s a toiletry bag) the format is just a little larger than my sketchbook and it has several net, zipper pockets which are great for all my sketching bits and bobs! Nothing worse than opening your bag and everything falls out. Next up is a new travel watercolour box, old faithful here is 35 years old, fabulous (bashed and widely travelled) but it weighs a ton. Over the years of dragging sketching equipment around you really become grateful for ever gram you don’t have to cart around, I ordered a new Sennelier travel paintbox but I'm still waiting (impatiently) for it to arrive! 

In the meantime I'll keep carting around the old one and I'm sure it helps burn calories and improve my bingo wings (positive thinking:))!