2 pages, black on white.

i picked up more gesso! i was given a little bottle of Bob Ross gesso... which smells sort of funky-minty-glue-y. bleh. i'm using it up, but after that's gone, i have a bucket of Plaza gesso which is soooo much cheaper. BR was $11 for 473ml bottle (yikes!) and the Plaza was on sale for $18.95 for a gallon. srsly.

anyway, i have been priming every surface. prime prime prime. i'm not quite half way through the journal yet. i figure i'll keep priming. though it's been wet here (rainy!) the last 2 days and it's slowing dry times a lot. (to the point where i have to stand the sketchbook in front of my space heater to dry it! i only do that when i'm sitting right next to it, and i make sure it's far enough away that it's just heated, not burning hot. safety tip!)

i bought a Techliner .3 mm black pen (by Alvin). it seems to work pretty well, though i haven't tested it with my watercolors yet. it dries out after about 20 minutes of drawing on gesso, and the nub is flat already. still, i got it to work again when i tried it on un-primed paper. i'm not sure how i feel about this pen. will let you know more later...





as you can see from the pages, i glued in a pocket for a minizine i received from a swap on http://www.swap-bot.com. i also taped it down with my favorite acid free black masking tape... yum! picked some up when i went out with FarmBoy yesterday.

we checked out his brother's tattoo shop. that's going to be a cool place when it's hung with art. it's pretty cool now, even bare bones. probably there will be some photos from there coming up in this sketchbook at some point.

experimenting with pens! woot.

oh, in case you were wondering what Spike looks like, here's a photo of him in his preferred place--chilling behind my laptop watching me. he likes to chase the cursor in World of Warcraft. bwaha. so cute. (not that there's really room for him on my desk...)