Sketching with a Moleskine sketchbook

Here is a compact sketching kit. It consists of a Moleskine pocket sketchbook, a mini waterbrush and a watercolor box I made (I love making things). There is a small Winsor Newton brush in the watercolor box to supplement the waterbrush. The Moleskine sketchbook paper is slightly water resistant, but after the first few strokes it seems to take watercolor just fine. I like its small slim size and the fact that the pages lie flat to allow double page spreads (without an ugly spiral spine going down the middle).

The ink in the sketch of the trees was regular fountain pen ink (water soluble) in a fountain pen, so I saved the inking for after the watercolor. This resulted in a loose, free style rather than the "coloring book" look which is so easy to fall into if you start with a tight ink drawing. I like this method since it keeps with the principle of starting out loose and then tightening up as you progress. I can start with light watercolor swashes in a sort of preliminary drawing and get the basic shapes down and then gradually tighten up the sketch as it starts to form.

More Moleskine sketches are on page 16, plus my discovery of watercolors that actually work well with the Moleskine sketchbook.

I have also written a separate article called sketching with a Moleskine that contains current information.

Other Moleskine links:

Moleskinerie is a fun website dedicated to Moleskines.

'skine.art Moleskine Art is a fun website dedicated to the artistic use of Moleskines.