Studio Sunday - Orbits!

I love back-to-school time, because you can find all manner of things on sale from July to September. Case in point, the cosmetics case that I have turned into my new watercolor travel kit! Since my attic studio is mostly too hot to work in during the summer, I figured this would work well to keep my supplies organized and portable.

It's one big case with 3 smaller cases inside... the top left case holds my tube watercolors and metallic/iridescent liquid acrylics. The top right has an eraser, my mini-mister spray bottle, and a new box of Crayola crayons (also on sale for back-to-school!). The bottom has my Koi 18-pan watercolor kit with waterbrush, two new boxes of Crayola colored pencils (regular and metallic), a mechanical pencil and my watercolor brushes. The case is also big enough to hold a thin 5x7 watercolor pad in the back and a postcard-sized watercolor pad on top.

Now for the studio stuff! I did a little prep work last night on my watercolor paper centerfold that I cut last week. I drew lots of circles and stars lightly in pencil; I'd decided awhile ago that the theme for the centerfold would be orbits. Then today in the studio (hubby's computer room again!), I drew over top of my pencil lines with a white crayon.

Next I took the gold and silver colored pencils and scribbled in random accents, tracing around some of the shapes. Part of the fun of the Sketchbook Project for me will be trying out new techniques, so this one is basically to test out different resists. I'm not a fan of masking fluid, and gesso works well but can be hard to draw with. If your colored pencils are wax-based, they should resist the watercolor wash.

Next comes the wash... As you can see the crayon was a good resist, but it's hard to tell the strength of your marks when you're drawing with a white crayon! Some areas turned out stronger than others, but I'm liking the imperfections here. The silver colored pencil is nearly invisible, but the gold lines still peek through here and there.

Then I spattered over top with Iridescent Silver, Bronze & Pearl fluid acrylics. I let the watercolor dry a little longer before the spattering this time, as I didn't want to completely obscure my resist lines.

And here's a close-up of Orbits...

Next week I'll be doing the cover!