Saguaro Sketch Journal is uploaded at LAST!

Here is is April, and I have just, today, uploaded my sketch journal adventures-plus-tutorial for the sketching trip I took LAST DECEMBER!  Good grief!

My new sketch journal!

It isn't that I'm such a goof-off (although there's some of that, too, I admit). The main reason is that instead of making one e-book I created two, and both of them ended up being around 64 pages long. 

An original ballpoint pen page.

That's a humongous lot of work, and it took me awhile to get them written, tweaked, proofed, and the webpages and links on my website created and, well, have a life at the same time.

It happened like this.....When I was camping out and sketching in the Saguaro forest near Tucson in December, it was so cold at night (in the low twenties!) that I couldn't do as usual and watercolor-pencil-paint my sketches in the evenings in warm and cozy lodgings. 

So my sketchbook arrived back home in a black-and-white state, and after scanning all of the sketches into my desktop publishing program, I had to decide what to do about the situation.

My original bighorn sheep sketch in ballpoint pen ....

It's a lot more fun to paint your sketches on the spot, and I really wasn't in the mood to do it in January when I got home, but everyone I showed it to said it needed color, so I sat down with my watercolor pencils and waterbrush, resigned, to do the deed.
But it was more fun than I expected.

...and painted with watercolor pencils.

In fact, it was a blast. And I realized, after I had painted a couple, that if I were to scan each step as I did it, alternating working and scanning all the way through each painting, I could create a really neat tutorial with step-by-step instructions for painting individual subjects. 

A page from the workbook.

So, I recorded and made notes as I painted twelve of the sketches, with three to five pages of instruction for each one and scads of scans and tips for anyone wanting to try their hand at it.  

It  is really detailed, from selecting the color of pencil, to planning the color scheme,  to demonstrating the strokes (pencil and brush) needed to get the specific effects I was envisioning, and lots of other stuff besides. I made it into a sort of coloring book, so if you want you can print out the black-and-white original drawings on heavy paper and paint them using the tutorial as a guide, just for the fun and practice.

My new  workbook

When I was finished, working on both books at the same time, I had created my usual sketch-journal-with-tutorial (see at the top of this blog), plus the step-by-step workbook of twelve sketches-to-paintings at left. And [TA-DA!] here they are.

I've just finished the upload so that if you want to see the results all you have to do is go to my website and read about them ~ and if you want, order them.  Here's the location of the sketch journal, Saguaro Sketch Journal and here's the step-by-step painting workbook, The Canyon Country in Watercolor Pencils.

The scene from my first night's campground.

They're both crammed with sketches and paintings and I'm very pleased with them both. I'm especially happy to get a new workbook out, as it's been awhile since I put up a new workbook on my website. This workbook is quite a bit longer and more dense than previous ones, and it will be useful to artists, even if they aren't particularly in love with cactus and coyotes. The techniques for painting with watercolor pencils are the same no matter what the subject.   

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BTW, I began an new exciting (and ongoing!) adventure on the first of March that I will tell you about in the next blog. It's something totally novel to me, so I'm eager to share it with you!  Stay tuned!