anika mari

I recently finished up four drawings for my sister-in-law. I started by doing sketches in my sketchbook and then drew the final drawings on bristol. When I started working on the final drawings, I noticed that my markers behaved very differently on the different paper.

The paper in my sketchbook is much more porous than the bristol that I worked with for the final drawings. The markers blend really nicely in my sketchbook, and the colors are quite a bit softer than they appear on the bristol. The main drawback of the sketchbook paper is that the color tends to bleed right across the black ink lines.

I did a drawing in my sketchbook of seaweed, and the markers bled across the lines significantly. You can see the bleeding clearly where the gray from the background bled into the leaves of the light green seaweed.

The bristol must not absorb as much of the ink, so more of the ink stays on the surface, making colors appear brighter. While it was actually really nice that the markers didn’t bleed across my inked lines, that meant the colors didn’t blend together either, but that might be a worthwhile trade off.

I thought it made a lot more sense to start doing sketches on bristol so that I could get a better idea of what to expect in terms of the final appearance, since most of my final drawings have been on bristol lately.

When I was at the art store, I found a little 6×6 inch pad of bristol paper for under $3. I bought it to try out as a new sketchbook. It was a similar size to my old sketchbook, so I redrew the seaweed image to compare the differences of the paper.

It is pretty clear that the drawing on bristol is a lot crisper. The color didn’t bleed very much at all. In fact, in the areas where there is some bleeding, I attribute that mostly to my own impatience.

In comparing the two sketchbooks side by side, the actual book is a lot neater and more contained. The bristol is a glued pad of paper, so the sheets pop right out when you turn the page.

Despite the messiness of the paper and the potential for disorganization, I must say that for most drawings, even sketches, I’d prefer to control where the color goes, over being able to blend colors. I could always make a little “sketch box” for my bristol paper to make it more portable and easily contained. Plus, the detached pages make it easy to get a good scan, and the square pages are easy to cut up and reassemble when drawing patterns. Plus the pad of bristol is less than 1/5 the cost of the bound sketchbook! Seems like there are lots of pluses. Also seems like I’ve found my new sketchbook!