10 minute landscapes

How I stumbled upon a sketchbook practice

I’ve always struggled to start (and, more importantly, keep) a good daily sketchbook practice. This year I had in mind to crack open a brand new sketchbook on January 1st and mark the start of the year with This-time-it’s-for-real sketchbook practice.

Would it have worked? I can’t really tell, because, without actually meaning to, I stumbled upon a sketchbook practice way before New Year.

December 14, Day 1: choosing the palette and trying out colour blending is not included in the 10 minutes of sketching.

So, what happened? When my fellow artist

Adam Ming

was designing his new 10 minute artist challenge in mid December, he prompted us to join him - everyone can spare 10 minutes a day to sketch, right? Sure, I’ll give it a try, I thought, but I didn’t want to “spoil” my brand new New Year’s Resolution sketchbook so I grabbed another one in a much smaller size that didn’t look too intimidating and the first couple of spreads were already filled with random doodles so there was no blank page pressure.

I recently bought a box set of Faber Castell Polychromos coloured pencils and was waiting to try them out. I wanted to pick an easy subject to draw, something forgiving and open to personal interpretation so a landscape seemed like the easiest choice for fast and loose sketches. I usually find my reference photos on the web or on my phone’s camera roll, but someday I’d also like to regularly sketch directly in nature.

Day 15: my Polychromos pencil collection was missing some landscape colours so I bought additional sky and earth tones (from Derwent, Caran D’Ache and Prismacolor).

A Domestika course Sketchbook illustration with colored pencils by Zoë Barker gave me some great tips about time restricted sketching, choosing the colour palette and blending the colour pencils together. I like to set my timer to 9 minutes and a half, leaving those extra 30 seconds to add any final details once the alarm goes off.

I usually sketch in the morning after breakfast, and once the sketch is finished I snap a picture and post it in my Instagram stories. Over the Christmas break I’m visiting my family in Slovenia so my schedule has changed a bit but I still try to squeeze in some sketchbook time later in the day (hence the darker photos, taken with artificial light…)

It’s Day 17 of my sketchbook practice and after I post this I will scroll the web for a nice (not too complicated) landscape photo to draw tonight. I’ll pick 5 to 7 pencils that most fit the image and I’ll fill another spread in my tiny sketchbook. Will you join me? You can spare 10 minutes a day to sketch, right?

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