Sketch Books For Drawing And Painting?

Question

Whats good paper for drawing? Is it me or is sketch book paper too soft? Whats good? And as far as painting goes, whats easiest to learn first, oil, acrylic, water?

Answer 1

For drawing or sketching I use a sketch book with acid free 90 or 100 pound paper suitable for dry media and light water media.The back cover of the sketch book will describe what the paper is recommended for.

Acrylics are the best and safest to handle and learn. Oils are the most forgiving and easiest to work with, though not the most pleasant. Watercolors are the most challenging to learn and paint with. You definitely need an artist's eye to paint with watercolors.

Answer 2

I just use regular sketch paper for drawing, or even printer/copier paper if I'm working on something small. But I'm not sure what exactly you mean by it being "too soft."

When learning to paint, oil is easiest in some ways. Since it dries slowly, you can keep reworking a section of a painting until you get it right, and fine blending is really easy. If you want to paint very directly, it's probably the best medium to start in. But because oil dries slowly it's also easy to overwork paintings and make mud out of them. If you decide to wait until a painting is dry to go back and fix it, you'll have to wait a few days at least. And oil can be messy, what with the oily mediums and solvents you'll need; it leaves gunk everywhere if you're not careful, and the fumes are bad if you don't have good ventilation.

Acrylic dries really fast, even with all the extenders and glazing mediums available, so you have to learn to work quickly. If you're doing fine realism, you have to build up lots of layers to get it to look right, and learning how to blend takes a lot of practice and patience. The advantage to it drying fast, however, is that you can add the next layer within a few minutes, building up lots of layers in a short period of time. Acrylic also cleans up with soap and water, unlike oil.

Watercolor is its own weird thing; I do a little bit of it, but not much. It's not that hard to shift between oil and acrylic, but watercolor is so different from either one, and has its own inherent difficulties.

Answer 3

The so-called "sketching paper" you seem to dismiss is called that for a good reason. A good quality drawing paper is textured, so that it catches the drawing medium, such as pencil graphite, charcoal, conte' crayon or whatever. This texture is called the paper's "tooth." Cheaper papers have less tooth than the more expensive.

If your final image is to be some medium on paper. THESE are the best papers to use.

For practice sketching and drawing, a very good compromise is a paper called "newsprint" It is similar in texture to regular newspaper, but, of course blank. Most newsprint tablet papers are not bleached, so that there is a light brown tint to it. Newsprint has a reasonably good tooth, so makes for great practice paper.

Still, I always suggest for budding and even accomplished artists to practice drawing from life as often as possible, so, virtually ANY paper is good for practicing. Before any professional assignment, I do dozens of "thumnail" sketches. For this, I use up a lot of scrap paper, such as the back of my test prints or any used copy paper.

When you do, finally, get ready to set down your final drawings, be sure to invest on a good quality, acid free paper. These are for keeping your drawings for generations.

Keep practicing!