To increase the variety inside my sketchbooks I've been experimenting with ways to pre colour the blank pages.
A fun way of doing this has been to use watercolour paints to wash over the pages in different colours.
For these colour washes I simple used a wad of wet tissue and brushed it over my paint pallets, then scrubbed it across the paper.
My watercolour palette and tissue used.
I quite liked this soft colouring effect and thought it was a good way to create atmospheres in my sketches- for example I would use a duller, more muted wash for maybe a drawing of the beach we went to, or maybe I could do someone's favourite colour underneath a portrait of them to give the piece some more personality.
On another page I also splattered some paint onto the page and smudged it with my hand. I quite liked the way it looked and think it will be interesting to see how sketches on top will look.
Another thing I experimented with was different brush edges and shapes. Usually I would use a flat square brush to apply colour however for the next two washes I tried a fan shaped brush, shown in comparison to the square brush below.
This was the result of the fan shaped brush:
The fan shaped brush made streakier strokes and I thought looked quite good when applied with a dark colour on a lighter background.
The last way of applying watercolours that I tried was doing a dark grey wash on a page and then using crumpled tissue to lift some of the pigment from the page, which resulted in this smoky, foggy appearance:
I think this kind of background will be good to use in the future because it's got a quieter, more subtle texture than some of the other ones I tried.
