Sketchpacker Diaries

Thursday, July 31, 2014

A Flurry of Travels and Unfinished Projects, and Sketching George Town II Video

This year must be the year I hit a record. I've been on 3 trips in just over half a year, and there's one more major one coming up. In fact, I haven't finished up my sketchbooks for my last trip, and I haven't finalized my itinerary for the next trip, which is coming up in just over a month! That's not counting the various other commitments and projects I have on hand.

At this point, I'm trying to finish up a couple of things left from my last trip about 3 weeks ago. I joined urban sketchers from Southeast Asian countries, Melbourne, UK, and New Zealand, for a 3-day event in Penang, Malaysia, organized by the Penang group. Sketching George Town II was a tremendous success. I just finished cutting the video last night and left it rendering overnight, so I'll let it do the talking. I'll update with a blog post on it soon.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Church Camp Sketching - GLCC Camp Recharge 2014

I just returned from a 5-day church camp in Johor, Malaysia. I brought 3 sketchbooks along, but used only one - the self-made A5 landscape Daler-Rowney sketchpad, which I created from halving an A4 portrait one (the other 2 sketchbooks were for other purposes, which I didn't have time for). The sketchbook doubled up as my sermon notebook. I figured I'd be a lot more inclined to look at a sketchbook in future than dig out my old camp booklets to flip through the sermon notes.

In the 5 days, I managed to fill 29 pages of sketches and notes, and a few other items pasted in there. The sketchbook, however, has 40 pages, so I'll probably fill the rest with photographs. I've scanned those 29 pages and here they are!

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

I Need These!!! (WARNING: Disgusting photo and video alert!!)

When i went to Siem Reap in January, one of the unfortunate things I had to deal with was a choked water closet. The staff took 2 full days before they did anything about it despite several reminders, and it only took one of them 10 minutes to do the job when they finally got about to it. This is what it looked like before the WC was cleared. Everytime I flushed, the mush of disintegrated toilet paper and poo would get stirred up again.

Those who live in first-world urban cities like Singapore (such as myself) can be quite spoiled. We don't realise that in many places, WCs do not have vacuum capabilities to suck in the waste. That's why there's a bin next to them to throw the toilet paper used to wipe your unmentionables (there was one such thing in my hotel in Xi'an, China, with a sign reminding us to throw the paper in the bin and not try to flush it down the bowl). I don't like that way of doing things as I think flushing the soiled paper down the toilet bowl would be a lot more hygienic, but if it's going to come right back up, that would be even less hygienic. But when in Rome....

Until now.

Today I saw a video in my Facebook news feeds that changes EVERYTHING. If only I had this when I went to Siem Reap!

So if anyone is going to Korea, please help me get some! Someone ought to import this, if it hasn't already been done. Or maybe... I should import it.... Hmm... I shudder to imagine what would happen if the plastic or the glue gives way, though...

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Pocket School-Grade Colour Pencils

Staedtler, Koh-I-Noor, and Faber Castell
school-grade pocket colour pencil sets

I have 3 sets of cheap pocket-sized colour pencil sets and decided to do a review of them after testing them out. These are easily obtainable at neighbourhood bookstores like Popular (except for the Koh-I-Noor in the middle, which I got from Overjoyed) and cost only around $2 SGD. Faber Castell even has a watercolour pencil version. I bought them because they were a handy size and cheap. A lot easier to bring around than my artist quality set (below):

I've recently reconfigured this set, which now contains
Prismacolor and Derwent Colorsoft pencils only.

You can't compare the quality of school-grade products with artist-grade ones, of course, but my pencil roll is not very light, and I don't use the whole range too often. Neither am I keen on sawing the pencils in two. The pocket sets were acquired for convenience. Nothing else. But out of curiosity, I took them out to compare them with each other. Here are the results:

Test was done on a Daler Rowney Graduate A5 sketchbook

How do they compare with my Prismacolors? Honestly, they suck. But what do you expect when a single Prismacolor pencil costs more than a whole box of student-grade pencils? The colours may look pretty saturated in the scan, so here's a photo:

It took quite a lot of pressure to get the colours at this intensity (i.e. I had to press pretty hard). The pencils don't contain a lot of pigment. You will notice that while each set contains 12 colours, there are slight variations. For example, Staetdler and Faber Castell both have beige - though different shades - while Koh-I-Noor doesn't. Faber Castell has GOLD while the other two have an additional shade of red in its place. The details of my findings are in the scan above, but to summarize it, I like Faber Castell's for its intensity and softness, while I prefer Staetdler's colour range. I like the Koh-I-Noor set least. If you look closely, the colour swatches aren't even and there's quite a bit of speckling going on. Maybe I got a lemon, but I'm not going to buy another set to try. Feel free to do so, though. It's only about $2 a box, and if you don't like it, you can give it to your kid or nephew/niece.

In light of this, I think I might go dig out my Global Art pencil case and use that in place of the pencil roll. It can't take as many pencils, but at least I can carry GOOD colour pencils around.

Global Art 24 pencil case

Thursday, February 20, 2014

A4 Portrait to A5 Landscape Sketchbook Mod

Sketchbook options in Singapore are somewhat limited, especially for those like me who like to vary their media, and who like the A5 landscape format. You can find decent A5 landscape watercolour sketchbooks such as Etcetra, Moleskine, and Strathmore, but the only A5 landscape format sketchbooks I've found for other media are either Daler Rowney's Original Classic Cachet sketchbook or the cheap stuff you get in neighbourhood bookstores, which are not of very good quality. Daler Rowney's Cachet A5 landscape sketchbook is also strictly for dry media. It buckles upon application of water, and quite badly. The only other decent option is the Sketch2book, a specialty sketchbook designed and produced by one of my friends, which is actually 2 sketchbooks in one - one side in portrait format and the other side in landscape (see below). It is a versatile sketchbook that takes ink, markers, light wash, pencils, and other dry media very well. However some might find it a little heavy (after all, it's 2 books with a hardcover), but apart from that, I love it. It is available through Arters, an online shop based in Singapore, which also stocks Daniel Smith watercolours and other sketchbooks.

Sketch2book, an A5-sized
landscape-cum-portrait format
conjoined sketchbook

Multimedia sketchbooks are not that difficult to find here, actually. It's just landscape format ones that are hard to find. Art Friend brought in some stock of Daler Rowney's hardcover Graduate series sketchbooks a while back, but the only landscape ones available were A4 size, and they were snapped up very quickly with no sign of replenishing stock. I actually like the Daler Rowney Graduate series, even though it is more towards the "student quality" grade. Despite that, I have found it to be suitable for dry media, markers, ink, and light watercolour wash. It's very versatile, but it doesn't come in A5 landscape.

At least not with some handiwork.

Daler Rowney Graduate A4 hardcover landscape sketchbook

Just a few days back, an idea occurred to me. I had a spare unused Daler Rowney A4 paperback portrait sketchbook lying around. What if I cut it down the middle? I'd get 2 landscape sketchbooks! So, that's what I tried today, and I took photos of the process. Here they are:

First, get yourself one of these. One of the
best things about this sketchbook is
they're very cheap.

Open it up and remove the staple binding.


The sketchbook is quite thick, so it might not be advisable to put the whole thing through the cutter. I separated the sheets and cut a few at a time.

Hold the sketchbook firmly as you chop it
in half. Don't let it slip or you will get a
curved edge.

Aaand.... you get 2 halves!

Each half is a landscape A5 sketchbook!

Now to bind the pages back. If you have a long-arm stapler, good for you.
If you don't, get a sturdy stapler and lay the sketchbook flat like this
on a thick piece of corrugated cardboard (or a few layers of it).

Align the stapler head with the spine, and punch the staples right through.
***DO NOT try to do this flat on your tabletop - unless you want holes in
your table!!

The result should look like this. My alignment is a bit off though.

Close the staples to finish the bind.

Completed modified sketchbook.

Wait. There's 2 of them!

So that's how you do it! Two A5
landscape sketchbooks for the price
of one A4 portrait one!

Halved A4 portrait sketchbook compared with A5 portrait sketchbook.
Both are readily available from Art Friend, but you'll have to cut
the A4 one yourself if you want it in A5 landscape.

The Graduate sketchbook may not have archival paper, but it is acid free. That's good enough for most of us. If you find it flimsy because of its soft cover, you can always bring a clipboard out, or make your own hardcover jacket. I haven't tried that yet, but may do so sometime later.

One more important thing to note is that the Graduate soft cover sketchbooks comes in 2 different paper weights - 140 and 160 gsm. The ones I use are 160 gsm and can be identified by their matte cover (the 140 gsm ones have a glossy cover). Actually there are 4 different paper weights in this range, which you can check out at their website. The whole range is not available in Singapore, unfortunately, so I just have to make do with what I can get. The A5 portrait one is only about $3 here, and the A4 can't cost much more. This is way cheaper than a Stillman and Birn, which costs about 6-8 times more, and even cheaper than Moleskines which will cost 10 times more for less pages of watercolour paper. Those on a budget (like students) might find this a good alternative, especially for more casual work. The only thing you will need to cut the sketchbooks is access to a paper cutter. Of course, you can easily do it sheet by sheet without one, but that's a lot more troublesome.

The following are some samples of artworks done using the A5 portrait 160 gsm one:

Hope you found this helpful!