New year, new sketchbook projects

I have so many sketchbooks on the go, what's two more! But what do you do if you can't find any sketchbooks on the market that contain the right sort of paper to be able to do the kind of painting you want to do? Well, you make your own! It's surprisingly easy, and while the three I've made so far probably wouldn't pass a commercial quality control inspection, they have character and they're never likely to fall apart!

These are the two I've made for my new sketchbook projects. The one with the decorative paper was from a kit (or the refill for a kit - I couldn't justify the price of the whole kit but I thought if I bought the refill and got all the bits, I could work out how they go together myself!). YouTube proved very useful, as always, and spurred me on to also make the larger purple one in the photo.

So, what am I doing with them? The smaller one (slightly smaller than A5) is for small random watercolour practice studies of leaves and other bits and pieces, all painted from life, except the tree trunk (above). Below and at the top and bottom of the post are some pages from this book. It is proving to be a really good way of practising a diverse range of plant parts without the commitment of a larger piece.

I've only just started the larger purple sketchbook (slightly smaller than A4). In this one I'm going to take a 'through the seasons' approach to record things (probably just plants) that I come across throughout this year. Here's the first page containing a collection of things seen on one of our local walks.

I'm going to use mainly pen and ink and pen and watercolour in this book to try to push my boundaries a bit and to get better at using this medium, using a dip pen and different inks for a bit of variation and an attempt to bring out the character of the subjects. And, in case you're wondering, yep, the pages are different colours! I accidentally ordered the off-white paper, which I'm not keen on for my paintings, so decided to make it into this book but didn't have quite enough to make the whole book!

Winter is a relatively quiet time where botany is concerned. However, there's still plenty to see. I love seed heads - their structural nature, and the promise of new life in the seeds, just waiting for the right conditions. And the lovely fat buds on the twigs are the leaves and flowers of the coming spring and summer. Even the muted colours I find rather beautiful. There's even some scope for exercising plant identification skills - trees and shrubs can be identified in winter by their twigs - looking at the buds, leaf scars and surface of the twigs, and seed heads can be identified from their seeds/fruits. Even though the dock I saw on the walk was just a few dried sticks with dried fruits hanging from it, I could tell by the shape of the fruits that it was Broad-leaved Dock, and the fruits also confirmed that the umbellifer was Hogweed.

I'm looking forward to filling my new sketchbooks. Restrictions on how far we can travel, if at all, will certainly limit what I see, but that maybe means I will include things that I would otherwise have passed by and considered not as exciting or attractive as things further afield and, in looking closely at them, perhaps I will discover that they are indeed just as exciting and attractive.