One of the exercises I like to do with my students is what I call a pre-painted page. I have them wet a page in their sketchbook with clean water, put plenty of paper towels behind the page to protect the rest of the book, then do a colorful wet-in-wet wash, completely covering the page with paint. We usually use three primary colors, such as Ultramarine Blue, Permanent Rose, and Cadmium Yellow Light.
After the paint has been applied with nice, big, juicy brush strokes, the page is tilted up at an angle, then spritzed with a fine-mist sprayer, so the colors flow and blend, leaving beautiful soft gradations of color. The pages usually need to dry overnight, because they’re so saturated with paint. After they’ve dried, you can paint on them as you normally would, but the base wash affects everything you put on top of it.
The variegated wash acts as the lightest value in the painting, so all you need to do is add midtones and darks to complete a sketch. This can be a time-saver when you’re sketching on location.
The sketch shown above is a pre-painted page that I did during my September 2024 Provence workshop. It’s a hybrid-type sketch that combines aspects of a gridded page and a composite.
I had everyone paint their wet-in-wet base washes the day before and let them dry overnight, then, when we were on location in St. Remy, we filled our pages with scenes we saw in the town.
One of the big old sycamore trees rambles across the page in a freeform fashion…
while the window and topiary are set apart in simple inked frames.
These are all scenes from the square in front of the courthouse in St. Remy. The sketches were painted using the same colors I used for the variegated base wash. This simplifies the painting process and gives the page a cohesive feel, because all the colors are connected by the rainbow glow of the soft background.
The lettering was drawn by hand with a pencil and then inked using a Staedtler Triplus Fineliner
I used the same type of pen to draw the decorative window grille. Because the ink is water-soluble, it was easy to just touch the lines with a damp brush and drag the color to fill in between the drawn lines.
The cup of gelato was a last-minute addition to the page – doesn’t it look cute perched on top of the metal grille?
Pre-painted pages can be used with grid or composite layouts as well as landscapes or still lifes. They make a great backgrounds for hand-lettered quotes, and they provide continuity to any sketch which has a variety of separate elements to it. Give them a try!
4 Comments
Hi Leslie! I’ve signed up for your workshop in France next Aug.30, 2025. Please advise as to what size/brand watercolour sketchbook recommended. I’ve been using the Etchr Perfect Sketchbook B5 hotpress for my ink and watercolour sketches (also have the coldpress version but find it somewhat rough for ink work). I can’t find the Travelogue brand that you used for most recent blog post. Where do you buy it and what surface and weight is the paper?
Peri
Here’s a link to the Handbook sketchbook on Amazon: https://a.co/d/bGADm3h
You should be able to see all the specifics of it there. I like the size of that sketchbook, but I wish the paper were a little heavier. I did get some shadowing on the back side of sketches that had dark, heavy ink lines, so it doesn’t work well to paint on both sides of the page. It’s okay if you only work on one side of the paper.
Have you tried the Stillman and Birn Beta series sketchbooks? The paper is nice and heavy, and it has a slight tooth to it, but it’s less textured than regular cold-press watercolor paper. I’ve always liked the Beta sketchbooks.
Hahnemuhle watercolor sketchbooks have been well-received by sketchers in recent years, too. Have you ever tried one? I’m away on a Caribbean cruise right now, and I’m trying a Hahnemuhle for the first time. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’ll be sending out a supply list for the Giverny workshop later this month. It will have lots of information about sketchbook options and plein air sketching setups.
Wow, Leslie. Your art and website are all looking really lovely. 🎄🎄🎉🎉😍😍
Thanks, Bobbie, glad you’re enjoying it.