Morning at Cockatoo Island

October 15, 2013 | 4 Comments


I treated myself to a little quiet sketching just for me this morning at Cockatoo Island. Life has been pretty busy in recent months (and of course that July holiday was crazy crazy) and I really feel the need to try to slow down somehow and in particular slow my sketching down! I also have a lot of concepts floating in my head and some things that I want to try out in my own work.


So today I went to Cockatoo Island on my own for some relaxing sketching… at a slow pace. No need to sketch anything in particular – just go with the flow. Somehow I came home with a lot of content and yet I wasn’t rushing from place to place or rushing my sketches. Obviously slowing down is a process that I need to go through – my natural sketching pace is still fast. I need to find what a friend called my ‘cruising speed’


I quickly grabbed some random loose sheets of watercolour paper late last night and I am not sure that either were exactly what I wanted today…. Cotman and Arches smooth. It is important for me that the paper is nice for my lamy pen to glide over. The cotman paper being gummed has some interesting impacts on the watercolour but I didnt like the arches much either.



You can see I did two versions of the drawing office at the same time – I think I prefer the cotman – certainly the colour is a lot more vibrant on the original.

For those of you who do ink and wash – what is your preferred watercolour paper?

Code:
SB = Stillman and Birn Alpha paper sketchbook
A = Arches Smooth 300gsm
C= Cotman 300gsm


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