I love starting a new sketchbook! I am a little bit particular about my sketchbooks, so this one was designated mostly for portraits. I started out by making the sketchbook with white TruRay construction paper. I love the texture and weight of it for a sketchbook and it’s very inexpensive. I simply fold the pages in 1/2 and tie the centers together with book binding cord.

The next thing I typically do is paint backgrounds on all the pages (well, I leave a few blank and just gesso them) but I love to play with hand made stamps, collage, paint (the cheap craft paint is best for these sketchbooks because it leaves the pages a bit dry and chalky feelings and they take the gouache much better) If you use high quality acrylic paints for the backgrounds, they dry more shiny and have kind of a plastic feel and doesn’t take the gouache very well. Just have fun, use a brayer, stamps, a little collage here and there, whatever grabs you to create your backgrounds! This really helps when creating your portraits as your not staring at a blank white page and often the backgrounds help with the theme of your portrait….and if your backgrounds not working, you can always just paint a new one!

Next it’s time to start sketching portraits and painting them! You can see below the difference between the portraits painted on a blank white background and the ones that I painted a background first.

Russia. For this piece I used Acryla Gouache by Holbein.

In this piece I used a Lyra water soluable graphite stick to sketch out the piece.

Ethiopia. The finished piece was created with gouache.

Vietnam. Painted with Acryla Gouache by Holbein.