Big Sketchbook Drawing!
For my sixteenth birthday last month (yay!!) my friends got me this awesome, ENORMOUS sketchbook! It’s an 18x24 Canson Mixed Media, and it’s awesome! I’ve been sketching away in it, after I got over my initial fear of ruining it’s beautiful pristine-ness ;) (And I didn’t worry for nothing!!! The first day I took it out, I IMMEDIATELY ripped the cover. Of course.) But I’m pretty happy with my sketches in it thus far! There’s something so rudimentary about a big sketchbook like that. It’s so nice to just doodle endlessly on a huge, expansive stretch of clean white paper. And for this piece, I did just that! Here it is bigger:
I had such a fun time working on this!!! Just doodling on that huge paper proved to be quite meditative, actually. Like a graphite Zen Garden!
I made this piece with a 1.3 mm HB PaperMate mechanical pencil, which I ended up having to refill 8 (!) times!!!! I love this pencil, though. I have six of them. The lead is so chunky and, as weird as it may sound, the black lead is a nice color? It’s also really easy to blend, without needing a blending stub or -gasp!- my finger. (I know, art geeks. I’m a disgrace.)
(By the way, that sounded like a paid endorsement, but I promise it wasn’t! I just really like this pencil!)
I started this work from the bottom left corner, because I generally prefer drawing with my right hand. Working-on-it tip: (as opposed to pro-tip - I’m not quite there yet! :) If you’re drawing with any material that might fathomably be able to smudge, don’t start from the same side as your dominant hand (?) For example, if you are right handed, start from the left corner! If you’re left handed, start from the right corner. This just makes it way easier to keep your drawing nice and crisp, without needing to lift your hand awkwardly off the paper for tiny details. Unfortunately, this piece did end up smudging in a couple places because my dang CAT, (looking at you, Rainy Poo-Pie) walked on it during my lunch break, and left little black footprints all over it. (She’s very subtle.) Hopefully you can’t tell, though :) I managed to erase most of it!
But anyway, I started with the cup with the bendy straw, and eventually worked my way all the way to the ghostly earring. I had such a fun time putting teeny tiny detail and easter eggs in this. Here are a couple you can look for, if you want!
Numbers 1-10
Three shark fins
A barcode
A tooth
Two floating eyes
Vines
Six letter “M”s
Two erasers
Two daisies
The letter N (hint: there’s two!)
Six windows
A target
A reflective surface
A lightning bolt
Good luck! If you found all of them, WOW! Go you! Feel free to post your achievement in the comments!
To close out, this spontaneous project was really fun to work on, and I plan to do many more! Maybe I’ll put them on here, with more searches! Thank you for reading!