On Friday we headed into Melbourne CBD, and I took the opportunity to visit Seniors Art Supplies and hunt for some sketching tools. Afterwards we had lunch in a cafe outside, and I drew this ironwork street lamp across the road from our table.

The tools I bought were…

Two pens are waterproof, which turns out to be the not-so-secret secret of avoiding the ink bleeding when you paint over them. The pen on the left produces a thin line, while the other has a soft paintbrush-like tip that produces a wider line with pressure. The street lamp was drawn with the latter.

The plastic-handled brushes hold water, and stand in for the brush, water bottle and/or reservoir I’d have to carry around and hold if I was to add colour to my sketches. You squeeze the handle to apply water to the bristles, and squeeze and wipe to clean them.

I tested all of these today, doing a sketch each for the pens and applying gouache paint on top. The pen lines didn’t bleed, even though the brushes tend to put a lot of water on the page. The excess water made the paper warp and buckle a little, however, but not so much that I would switch to a different sketch pad. Still, I’ll be keeping this in mind when deciding on the kind of paper I have in future sketch books.

I’ll post pics of the sketches in the coming weeks. Suddenly I have a backlog of sketches!