Something I didn’t make for school, for a change! This is from my little 5½” daily pocket diary type Moleskine. The idea is to do a drawing a day, though it doesn’t always work out that way. I try not to be too upset with myself if it doesn’t happen and just enjoy the times it does. Sometimes I go in afterwards and fill up days that have gone by – that was the case with this one, which I did a week later. The idea had been percolating but it took me picking up a new set of travel watercolors to actually do it. I used that set, plus Micron pens, mechanical pencil, gouache for the white, black ink and paintbrush for some of the lettering, and a set of mini alphabet stamps I picked up in Japan for the letters on top. (With thanks to Kathrin Jebsen-Marwedel for the idea! She does this type of thing a lot, and much better than me. Go check out her stuff on Flickr.)
It’s the second year in a row I’ve done a book like this. Last year I used the larger size daily Moleskine, I’m not sure whether I like this smaller one. It’s more portable and the pages are quicker to fill up, which is satisfying, but drawing on small pages can be annoying sometimes. I do like the two-page spread thing though. I don’t always color the pages, they’re mostly little smudgy pencil sketches and scribbled notes to myself. Both this book and last year’s have blank sections where I got too busy or distracted to draw, or was doing other types of art elsewhere. Last year’s is definititely more full than empty though, so I count it as a success.
