in support of practice paper.

Maybe it seems obvious, but when I first started watercolour and was dealing with the cost of supplies, I overlooked adding practice paper to my kit.

Y’know. Practice paper: a book or pad of okay paper on which you can doodle, experiment, goof around, try out techniques, swatch colours, et cetera, et cetera.

It took me almost a year before I bit the bullet and bought a coil book of mid-level watercolour paper and devoted it to whatever… low expectation, scrap, mucking about stuff.

The freedom to try something and not have it committed to your expensive supplies, or neatly bound books that seem like collections of your best efforts, just half-baked ideas tossed onto the page or muddled about, it frees up your practice for all sorts of learning opportunities.

Yesterday’s sketch was based on an idea for a technique that I had, but also didn’t want to commit to fully for a moleskine urban sketch book I’ve been working on. I trialed the method in my practice book, liked it, and then refined it for the second, final painting.

Seems obvious… but sometimes the obvious just isn’t.