More Sketchbook Explorations

If you’ve been following my blog for a while you might remember my post about the sketchbook projects my daughter and I were doing together inspired by Lisa Congdon’s Sketchbook Explorations classes. Today I’m sharing some more sketchbook doodles and patterns inspired by some of the classes and our family holidays to beautiful Cornwall! I took my little watercolour sketchbook with me and grabbed ten minutes here and there throughout the holiday to add some watercolour washes or to doodle with a pen. I also carried on working on some more sketchbook pages when I got home, developing some of the ideas and using different sketchbooks and materials.

Taking inspiration from the beautiful Cornish coastline, I started by playing around with a series of rock-pool inspired patterns, adding layers of watercolour and inky doodles:

There were some gorgeous hydrangeas near our holiday cottage, so I made a few floral inspired patterns next inspired by the beautiful flowers. Some ended up more abstract than others!

Our favourite beach near the cottage we were staying in has the most amazing rock-pools at low tide covered with all sorts of different varieties of seaweed. I used one of the techniques in the Sketchbook Explorations course to create these colourful seaweedy patterns:

If you’re interested in playing around with colour, shape and art materials in your sketchbook you might like to check out both of the Sketchbook Explorations courses, I really enjoyed them and often dip back into them for a little creativity boost! They include lots of great techniques for you to do with your kids and would make a perfect summer art project.

Materials Used

I took a little kit of my favourite drawing essentials away with me to Cornwall including:

• Moleskine watercolour notebook
• Sakura Koi Watercolour set (mini travel set of 12 colours) and Pentel Aquabrush
• Sakura Koi colouring brush pens (about 15 of my favourite colours!)
• Black fineliners in various sizes (my favourites are the uniball Uni-Pin pens)
• Uni-ball Signo white gel pen
• A few coloured gel pens (MUJI)

If you do start a sketchbook this summer I could would LOVE to see what you come up so please feel free to get in touch to share your sketchbook with me!