Cancelled Concert – McDonalds Fun

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Larry Marshall

This little guy was munching on a hamburger and fries. Stillman & Birn soft- Alpha (4x6), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon ink

This little guy was munching on a hamburger and fries. Stillman & Birn soft-
Alpha (4×6), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon ink

Yvan and I were going to sketch at a musical event in downtown Quebec City on Saturday morning but a blizzard was in progress and it was hard to get around town. Schools and offices were closed and even the buses were having a hard time.

As I trudged through snow on rue St. Jean I couldn’t help but think about how silly it was for someone, someone I resembled, to be expending this much effort to get somewhere to sketch. It was ‘free coffee’ week at McDonalds and I met Yvan there. We got coffee and looked out the window at the storm as we drank it.

Rather than be completely defeated, we both got out our small sketchbooks and did some quick sketches.

This plow was sitting down the street from McDonalds. The view from our second-story window was a bit odd but it made for a fun quick sketch. Stillman & Birn soft- Alpha (4×6), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon ink

Yvan's last name is Breton and this sign was hanging about half a block up the street. Stillman & Birn soft- Alpha (4x6), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon ink

Yvan’s last name is Breton and this sign was hanging about half a block up the street. Stillman & Birn soft- Alpha (4×6), Platinum 3776, Platinum Carbon ink

In many ways the storm and cancelled event could have soured the day. But we had some great conversations about art, did a bit of sketching and, like most sketching days, it was a good day. I’ll stop here as otherwise I’d have to start talking about the hours I spent the rest of the day clearing snow.

Winter Food Court Sketching

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Larry Marshall

My daughter’s was home from university for a week and we’ve had some snow storms. These two things combined to keep me from going out sketching. I was longing to do some so I headed out one morning to one of the big malls, and their food court.

Food courts are great places to sketch people, either while they’re eating or when they’re standing in line to order. All food courts are not created equal, however. There’s a mall really close to my house that has two food courts and they’re both horrible sketching locations. Why? Because it’s hard to sit so you can draw people ordering and their tables are crammed together, making it hard to sketch without someone slopping their Big Mac sauce on your sketch (grin).

But the one I went to is the newest in our city and it’s big, very roomy and there’s just the right distance between tables and vendors to allow lines to form in a couple directions (providing different angles) and the view open.

There’s not much to tell about the session. I got a cup of coffee and started drawing. I was using my Platinum 3776 with Platinum Carbon Black ink and I was sketching in a Stillman & Birn 4×6 softcover Alpha series book. Great combination for this sort of thing as I like to add a bit of color when I finish up and the S&B paper accommodates that nicely. I did time the session as I wanted to see how long I could keep doing it without getting tired. I’m a lazy sketcher and have to push myself to sketch for long periods of time. Come to think of it, long periods of time is a very relative term and, for me, “long periods of time” means relatively short. Quick sketching is rather intense as people are moving a lot, but I managed to draw for 45 minutes, punctuated by coffee drinking. I ended up with 14 sketches. Here’s some of them. I got tired of scanning. I told you I am a lazy sketcher (grin).

Hitting The Streets On Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2015 by Larry Marshall

I had an exciting experience today. It’s Christmas, December 25th, and I’m in Quebec City. Our average December high temperatures are 15-16F. But I got a spiffy new pair of gloves for Christmas and I decided to give them a test drive. There is no snow on the ground here, which is almost a miracle. but what definitely is a miracle is that it’s over 40F here today, or 25-degrees above normal. It was warmer yesterday 🙂

And so, though my purpose was to take a walk, I couldn’t resist the thrill of doing a street sketch on Christmas day. I sat on a bench at the edge of a park and drew this little sketch of a gate across the street. The sketch is trivial and yet incredibly significant to me at the same time. Outdoor sketching on Christmas; who’da thunk it?

Stillman & Birn Alpha softcover, Namiki Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black

Sketchcrawl at Pavilion Laurentienne

Posted on December 20, 2015 by Larry Marshall

In what seems a recurrent theme, I’m way behind in blogging. Maybe it’s the season, or maybe I’m just slowing down. It was a week ago that we held our monthly sketchcrawl, this time at Pavilion Laurentienne, which is a building on the Université Laval campus. They have a series of statues and they were our targets. I missed them entirely, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I arrived about 15 minutes ahead of schedule and since it wasn’t bitter cold (probably 38F) I decided to try to do a quick sketch of the building entrance. While probably not the right format, I decided to do it in my new, 3×5 softcover Stillman & Birn sketchbook. I sketched it quickly but even so, I was pretty cold by the time I finished so I didn’t add any color until I got warmed up inside.

Stillman & Birn Alpha 3x5, Namiki Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black

Stillman & Birn Alpha 3×5, Namiki Falcon, DeAtramentis Document Black

Once inside there was the normal meet and greet that starts most of our sketchcrawls. We ended up with eight people and the day was really fun. Everybody but me was sketching statues but I was into ‘testing’ my new sketchbook so I continued with the tiny format. Instead of statue sketching, I began to draw fellow sketchers.

Andre Gagnon was my first subject. He’s not only a really fun guy, he’s a wonderful artist. This day he was doing some fantastic work with a white pencil on black paper.

As I did this sketch I thought about testing something I thought of after I did the review of the Stillman & Birn softcovers. Since the Alpha paper buckles slightly if you use a lot of water, I wondered how not having a hardcover would affect how the book would close. With the hardcovers the buckling isn’t a problem as it happens as the sketch dries and once the cover is closed, the paper tends to flatten out. So, as I added color to Andre, I really dumped a lot of water onto the paper. In fact, it was too much for me to manage as I’m mostly ignorant of wet-n-wet techniques.

I continued these little sketches, avoiding the statues for the day. Here’s one I did of Yvan Breton, artist extraordinaire, who I consider both mentor and friend. Note the “easel” he’s using. It’s hung around his neck, very portable, and it can be used whether standing or sitting. We’ve sort of jointly been improving the design and I’ll do a blog post about it “real soon” (which means I have no idea when I’ll get to it). Again, I went heavy on the water as I wanted several pages that had been abused badly.

There’s one thing I noticed from my sketches that day. I made everyone much fatter than they really are. I wonder if they’re going to speak to me after I post these. We’ll see.

After lunch Yvan started drawing a fig tree that was in the atrium. He said it was hard to capture without adding all the details and I quipped (it’s easy to advise if you don’t have to take the advise), “Just draw it in two minutes and you’ll figure out how to do it.”

Unfortunately, my brain was listening and it decided that I was going to draw the tree quickly. I exceeded “two minutes” by an order of magnitude but I did draw it fairly quickly, leaving out much of the detail. I used watercolor pencils to color this one.

At this point we wrapped up the sketchcrawl and some of us headed for the bus stop. Yvan and I ended up on the same bus and he started drawing a woman he could see in front of him. She had a bright red hat that was an eye-catcher but I couldn’t really see her face because of a “thingie” that blocked my view. I drew her anyway, or at least her hat. This was done in a Field Notes book and thus the gridded paper.

Oh yeah…my watercolor/softcover experiment. The paper holds up better than it should for a 100lb paper, but those of us who use S&B Alpha paper have come to expect that. And I think I’m correct to be a bit more concerned about these softcovers staying closed after soaking pages with watercolor. It’s not a big deal but as there’s no weight to the cover, it simply won’t squish the paper flat. But, I now carry it with a rubber band wrapped around it and all is well. I may even install a more typical closure band if I can ever get caught up on the blogging (grin).

Review: Stillman & Birn Softcover Sketchbooks

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Larry Marshall

When I got into sketching, about four years ago, I found it pretty easy to find quality pens, pencils, brushes and watercolors. What was harder was to find a sketchbook that could accommodate pen, ink and watercolor. It seemed that I was buying a new sketchbook every week in an attempt to ‘try another’ in my quest for the perfect sketchbook.

My first post about Stillman & Birn sketchbooks was in December of 2011. A few other artists had discovered them and were really excited by them. I’d just gotten one and was very new to sketching so it was hard for me to evaluate it except to say that I liked it.

My first real discussion of S&B came in March of 2013, after I’d had some time to fall in love with their products. At that point I’d done a lot of sketching on their Alpha series paper and had just bought one of the Epsilon series sketchbooks. If you read that post you’ll get the impression that I worked as a sales rep for S&B but I do not.

In the future my daughter is going to be faced with the task of taking my sketchbooks to the landfill. When she does this, I suspect my pile of Stillman & Birn sketchbooks will be even larger. These are the ones I've filled in the past 3 years.

In the future my daughter is going to be faced with the task of taking my sketchbooks to the landfill. When she does, I suspect my pile of Stillman & Birn sketchbooks will be even larger. These are the ones I’ve filled in the past 3 years. Several others are ‘in progress’.

Since then I’ve been filling S&B sketchbooks at an alarming rate. I’ve tried not only Alpha and Epsilon papers but also their Beta, Zeta and Gamma sketchbooks. You can find reviews of these sketchbooks if you search for those words here. I have a lot of experience with Stillman & Birn products, and I can’t imagine using anything else.

But there’s been one sketchbook format that S&B hadn’t provided me, until now. I’ve whined to them about it enough that you’d think they would have made some just to shut me up. It’s a small (3×5) portrait format book that has paper good enough (interpretation = Alpha paper) to accept my scribbles and watercolor smears. Because this has not been forthcoming from S&B, I’ve been making do with crappy books from the dollar store, Field Notes, small (?) Visual Journals, Moleskines, etc. At this point I’ve filled 27 of the darned things. You’d think I’d know how to draw by now with all that scribbling. Maybe in another 20 years.

Anyways, Stillman & Birn has just released the solution to my small sketchbook needs, and then some. The photo above shows just a few of the many format/paper combinations available in this new series. All of the S&B’s paper types are available and each has its cover color-coded for that paper type (Alpha = burnt sienna (red?), Beta = blue, Epsilon = gray, Delta = green, Gamma = brown, Zeta = black). They’re available as 3.5×5.5 and 5.5×8.5 portrait or landscape format and in 8×10 portrait format.

I like the cover material. It feels almost like leather, though it is obviously not. It’s stiffer than the Strathmore softcover books, a plus for a street sketcher like me. The papers are the same great papers you can find in their hardcover books so I’m not going to talk about them. You can find my opinions by searching for the reviews on this blog but so far I haven’t found any that I don’t like. I use Alpha and Beta almost exclusively though.

Stillman and Birn have obviously tried to provide lighter and thinner sketchbooks compared to their hardcover books and in that they have succeeded in a big way. Here are a few comparison numbers:

Hardcover Softcover

Alpha 5×8 419gm 232gm
Beta 5×8 354gm 267gm

The thickness of a 5×8 Alpha hardcover is 18mm while the Alpha softcover is a svelte 10mm. In short, these new books are much lighter and thinner than their hardcover counterparts.

Here is my favorite. I’m showing it before I took the shrinkwrap off because now that I’ve opened it there is some drool on the front cover. It’s a small, Alpha-series portrait-format book. Many who use the Moleskine watercolor books have complained that Moleskine doesn’t produce it in a portrait format. I used to be one of them, but no more. I now have my small sketchbook need satiated, or at least it will be when I place an order for a bunch more of these little guys.

Do you need/want the softcover versions of Stillman & Birn sketchbooks? It depends. It depends upon whether weight matters to you. If you carry a single sketchbook and not very far, then giving up those nice hardcover bindings might not make sense. I carry several sketchbooks and regularly carry them during two-hour walks so cutting the weight nearly in half is a big deal for me.

Are you ever bothered by the thickness of your sketchbook, say when you’re trying to draw along the edge where you have no support for your hand? Do you wish the book were thinner when trying to draw across the gutter during early or late sections of the book, where one page is bent downward to reach the table due to the thickness of the book? If these things bother you, maybe having a book that’s half as thick would make you happy. Beware, though, this comes at a cost. While the covers reduce the thickness, the softcovers are also made thinner by a reduction of page count (in Alpha the hardcovers have 62 sheets while the softcovers have 48). I find this a small price to pay to get what I want in the small-size book.

There is one downside to these softcover books. They use the same double-stitched, glued bindings of their hardcover counterparts and the glue sometimes wicks between the signatures (the small groups of sheets that are folded and sewn together) and they tend to stick the base of the two pages between two signatures together. I don’t find this to be a problem with Alpha, and probably not with the other 150gsm paper books. Their pages fold open just fine. But with the Beta (270gsm) and probably Delta and Zeta books, the paper tends to separate slightly at the gutter when you fold open a section where two signatures come together (6 places in a Beta series book). This separation is very tight in the gutter of the two-page spread and if you’re working on either side of the gutter, it’s not a problem at all. But if you want to do a two-page spread, it can create an ugly gutter seam.

I’m thrilled with these new softcovers. I’ve only drawn a couple things in them thus far but I know the papers well and have documented their use in pretty much all the drawings presented on this blog. The softcovers, like Stillman & Birn’s hardcover and spiral-bound books, are great options for the urban sketcher or nature journalist. I feel lucky to live in a time when we sketchers have so many great choices, and all from one company – Stillman & Birn.