my secret sketching gear

update: check out this new interview on the tools artists use on october 2012!

In this post, I tell you all the secrets of my favourite material I carry all the time in my pocket.

First of all, my pencils, brushes and watercolour are all together in a vintage “Texas Instrument” case, and I will not exchange it for any other one. It’s the perfect size, and with a snap hook, I put it on my coat, or at my belt. So I have all my stuff ready to use and easy to access to.
The 2 hair clips (that I stole from Lapinette) are very useful to maintain the notebook open when it’s windy.


The inkpen is my principal tool. I start all the time my sketches with the lines, and the “Uni Pin fine line 0,1mm” fits my taste. It’s waterproof and the black ink is very dark, I love it.
I also carry 2 colours inkpen “Edding 1800 0,1mm” to copy logotypes or typography.


My watercolour box is a very compact one. It’s a special travel box, made by “Daler-Rowney, England” with 18 fine arts quarter pans. I fill the brush space with some additive colours, as some transparent red, a very cool green, and gold watercolour.
If I had to choose 3 colours, my favourite are the yellow ocre, the alizarin crimson and the russian blue. I sketch figures only with those 3.
I've only used a “Pentel” water brush for a short time, but I’m already addicted to it. I always carry 2 of them full of water, to get enough autonomy for the day, and a third one fill of yellow ochre liquid watercolour to have a bright and luminous yellow (most of the watercolour yellow pans are opaque).


Now it’s time to reveal that I also use a few secret weapons, as this 2 multicolour pens. The big one is a child gadget to raise my watercolour sometimes. The second is more “serious”, it comes from “Muji” in Tokyo, and it’s precise enough to sketch directly with it.
And while I can’t sketch with my usual technique (by night, or when the model has too much contrast), I paint with this black brush (also from Muji).
I must confess that I have brought back a full bag of pens and art supplies from Japan, and that my favourite material may change in the next months… I already adopted a family of “lapin’s stamps”!


Related to my sketchbooks, I have all the time in the pocket a small Moleskine (9x14cm, 192 pages) to sketch in the subway, at a terrace, anywhere… and for some more elaborates sketches, I use some old notebooks I find at a flea market. I especially like the lined paper and the amazing quality of it. I start yesterday my sketcbook number 119… my library is full of them ;)

What sketching tools do you carry?

blogged on urban sketching symposium