Outdoor sketching with Toby

I did a little bit of walking and sketching outdoors in Maxima Park with Toby last week… affectionately called “labradoodling” from now on, lol!

I worked with a few different kinds of drawing tools. I’m still figuring out which ones I like best for quick outdoor sketches, for different effects, for different types of explorations (line or value or texture, for example), and for the texture of my sketchbook paper.

I didn’t love working with my graphite stick on this textured paper. I prefer cleaner lines. This feels a bit scruffy and scumbly. Though I think contrasting the graphite stick marks with a thick, flat, dark (or very light?) line with a Posca marker or thick, opaque paint, or perhaps working on smooth paper would likely make me happier with the graphite stick.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Posca acrylic marker and the way that it invited me to create strong value differences and to focus on line work rather than shading.

Toby was excellent company.

I was pretty happy with the way that my 2B pencil felt. It’s a thick one and I liked that I could use it on it’s side to shade and achieve some nice thin lines too, and it also allowed me to create both dark and light marks.