To help people out with their New Year’s Resolutions of learning to draw, I thought I’d drop in my two cents on getting started or getting into it.
A concern I find is the lack of time to draw. When I’m always on the go and away from my drawing desk at my day job, having a small sketchbook helps me jot down ideas!
SketchWallet and Small Sketchbooks
Small Sketchbooks are Portable Sketchbooks. A portable sketchbook means you have a sketchbook on hand all the time. The smaller the pad, the more portable! So for the past year, I’ve used various 3.5 inch x 5.5 inch (9×14 centimeter) sketchpads in for sketching and note-taking.
My personal recommendation is getting a SketchWallet! It holds my money, credit cards, business cards and any 3.5 x 5.5 inch sketchbook in one place in my pocket! It’s been invaluable for me to have a small sketchbook to jot down ideas!
When I bought the SketchWallet, it comes with one of their own brands of blank 3.5 x 5.5 inch sketchbooks. After filling that first book out, refills can be purchased in a 3 pack! There are options of White, Toned (Tan and Grey), or Ruled. I purchased the white pages and toned pages in the past. These sketchbooks are great for pencils and graphite sketching, as they have a good tooth quality that makes blending dry media tones easy. Unfortunately, wet art mediums such as ink and paint will bleed through the pages and make unwanted marks to the next pages.
The SketchWallet is fantastic, but it can accept other 3.5 x 5.5 sketchbooks! Try out other sketchbooks with their own paper weights and stock to see what helps with your preferred media. Below is a list of sketchbooks that I recommend for portable drawing.
Moleskine Cahier Kraft Journals
These are my workhorse sketchbooks for the 2020 year as they’re easy to impulse buy during my trips to Blick Art Supplies Stores compared to ordering online from SketchWallet and waiting for the shipment. The papers a similar in weight and grain, so they’re good for dry media like pencils and charcoal. The biggest advantage to it is its cheaper price for the page count, having 64 pages compared to Sketchwallet’s 60 pages.
Crescent RendR Softcover Sketchbooks
The big thing about all the Crescent Rendr sketchbooks is that its paper doesn’t bleed with markers and inks. These 64 pages are thick enough not to bleed, but thinner and rougher than Bristol board. A detriment to this paper is that because it’s set up for markers not to bleed, it doesn’t blend marker ink as well as Bristol Board or Marker Paper. The paper is also toothy enough that precise lines from tech pens will still look feathered and fuzzy. It’s the closest I feel to having a mini Bristol board in my pocket next to Artist Trading Cards.
Talens Art Creations Sketchbook – Lake Blue
These are my favorite sketchbooks of the bunch, holding a chonky 80 pages! The paper tooth has enough grain to feel good to sketch with my pencil, while smooth enough for drawing with Fountain and Tech pens to have a clean line. But 90 lb pages mean there’ll be problems with heavier inks. Another drawback is that the hard binding makes it difficult to fit in the Sketch Wallet, so if you want to use this and only this sketchbook, you don’t need the SketchWallet.
My Personal Recommended Pens
My ideal pen can fit in my jeans pockets. You might have a purse or a backpack, but it’s good for to keep 1 to 3 pens on hand for drawing. Here are my recommend pens that I often use in my sketchbook art.
0.5 Mechanical Pencil (Any are good as long as it doesn’t need sharpening.)
The Graphgear 500 is a precise mechanical pencil that I use for portability and ease of use.As it’s a mechanical pencil, I don’t have to spend time or mess sharpening it. I have them at 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9, and I’m able to get the leads in alternate hardnesses and colors! These days I stick this pencil as my mechanical Blue Line Pencil for pre-sketches before inking.
Pentel Tradio Stylo
It’s my personal favorite general-purpose inking pen. The felt tip has the right balance of firm flexibility to give me thin lines without compromising thick and thin linework. The flow is good enough that it will draw even with a lighter hand, allowing less rigidity in drawing to the point where I can sketch with it without a pencil underdrawing. The only downside to it is that it’s water-soluble, so if you want to paint watercolor or use markers with this, the lines will run. If you’re getting this, also consider getting refills with it!
Pentel Pocket Brush
When I need to make fast ink brushwork with no dipping and thick and thin lines, this is the often recommended pen to use to learn how to use a brush. The ink covers plenty and can be painted on and drawn over with markers, but depending on the paper will dry slow so be careful of smudging. Don’t forget the refills!
Faber-Castell Kneaded Eraser
In general, it’s better to learn to commit to your art by not erasing. But if you badly need one, a Kneaded Eraser is your best bet. I’ve chosen kneaded erasers over others as they can erase with more control over how much I want to get rid of unwanted sketch lines. I can lighten up strokes or clean up mistakes. Not only that, but I can pull apart and mold the eraser to a better shape to fit my hand and mold it to a small point to erase things to a line.
Tombow Mono Ultrafine 2.3mm Elsastomer Eraser
Using the mechanical pencil’s eraser can be a pain in the butt because it rubs down too short or pushes down into the lead barrel, needing to pull it back up again. The Tombow Elastomer Eraser is an eraser pen that stores one long eraser. It’s cleaner to hold in my pocket than a kneaded eraser, and not as big to erase on like a white plastic eraser. I prefer keeping the Kneaded Eraser for versatility, but the eraser pen is fine if you know you don’t need to erase big mistakes.
Going Forward
With these supplies, it will be easier to keep drawing supplies close by whenever you have inspiration to have a new idea or have free time to sketch. Even if you don’t have time in the day, you can still draw in a short time.
Draw Small, Fast and Bad
Try to give yourself at least one minute of your time to draw something. One minute isn’t time to get a big detailed picture of a character or a place, but a basic idea of the picture and the shapes. You don’t need to worry about accuracy and proper anatomy, as you can refine it later and people aren’t going to stand around waiting for you to finish drawing them.
When drawing in a small sketchbook, you have no choice but to draw smaller than you would on copy paper or a canvas. Don’t expect to have good art in your small sketchbook in a short time. Art is too small for anyone to notice.
On a small sketchbook, you need to simplify your art. Simplified Art means figuring out the essence of the drawing as concisely as possible. That kind of stuff is the core of real cartooning!
On a smaller page, you won’t have the space to make excessive detail. In the folowing example, This Lion Knight is a drawing on 9 inch x12 inch Bristol board, while the second is a drawing on 3.5 inch x5.5 inch Sketchbook.
The former is on a larger page and can fit more detail but since you physically need to draw larger, it takes longer compared to the smaller sketchbook.
Comeback Later
Finally, know that you can come back to bad drawings to make good art later when you have more time and a clearer idea of what you want to draw. Multiple sketches and studies can be combined into a larger illustration. Those mini sketches can be a guide to what you want to draw for your bigger drawings.
Remember that it’s your sketchbook, it doesn’t need to be clean or coherent to anyone else but you! Your sketchbook isn’t permanent, and ideas in them can be in flux. One idea for an illustration can deviate from your original sketch into something more!
Conclusion
Sketching in a paper notebook is a good way to keep your brain sharp and keep ideas in order. When you fill a book and store them, you can return to them for reference or to see your artistic progress.
Drawing every day is a fast way to improve at the act of drawing. But, don’t go crazy about being diligent to the detriment of any responsibilities you have! Even if that one minute in your day passes, and you have to do something else, you can continue on the next day at achieving a small goal!
If you like what I write, consider checking out my other tutorials! You can also drop my a few bucks on my way on my Ko-Fi page. There I have first drafts of my blog articles, work in progress artwork, and early access to projects I’m working on!