Journal /
Illustration
A sketchbook you’re allowed to ruin
Good paper makes careful painters. A cheap book you have promised to fill, badly if needed, is where your colour actually gets better.
Most people who join the watercolour course arrive with a beautiful sketchbook they have never used. It was a present, or a treat to themselves, and the paper is so good that every first mark feels like a waste. So the book stays on the shelf, and the painting never starts.
On day one I ask everyone to put that book away and buy a cheap one instead: a small A5 or A6 book with paper that buckles a little when it gets wet. Then I ask for one promise. You are allowed to ruin every page.
Why careful painting looks stiff
Watercolour rewards a loose hand. The paint moves, mixes and dries in ways you cannot fully control, and the best washes come from letting it. When you are scared of spoiling the page you go back in to fix things, and every fix leaves a hard edge or a muddy patch.
A cheap book takes the fear away. If the sky bleeds into the hills, you turn the page. After twenty turned pages you start to notice which bleeds you liked, and that is how you learn what water does.
“The page you ruined taught you more than the one you framed. Keep both, but only one of them was practice.”
Fill the first page on purpose
The hardest page in any sketchbook is the first one, so we get it out of the way. Open the book and fill the first spread with colour tests: a stripe of every paint in your box, then each one watered down, then two of them mixed. It takes ten minutes and it looks like nothing much.
Colour tests on the first spread. Nobody needs to see them but you.
It does two useful jobs. It shows you how your paints really behave on this paper, which is never quite what the label says. And it means the book is already started. Nobody has to make a perfect first page again.
A week of ruined pages
For the next seven days, paint one small thing a day and give yourself fifteen minutes. A cup, a pear, the view from the bus stop. Do not plan it and do not fix it. When the time is up, write the date in the corner and close the book.
At the end of the week, lay the pages out side by side. You will see the same mistakes on Monday and Tuesday, and by Friday you will see them less often. That is what progress looks like in watercolour: not a masterpiece, but a page that went wrong in a more interesting way.
Bring the book to your first live class if you join us. It is the most useful thing you can show me, far more than the good paper you have not touched yet.
Learn this properly
Watercolour in a small sketchbook
6 weeks
· £260
