Hello everyone, I am very interested in building a habit to sketch more on location this year. I have a few upcoming trips and I want to be able to sketch & paint fast to capture lots of scenes. I also want to work on my sketches to be more impressionistic.

Any sketching lovers here? I enjoy the peaceful moments of sitting down with a pencil and bringing an idea to life on paper. I'd love to connect with fellow artists and share our passion for drawing. What do you enjoy sketching the most — portraits, landscapes, animals, or everyday life?

I love travel, and nature, and really like the attention and detail you see when you sketch. I’ve loved looking at examples of amazing travel journals over the last few years, though you can easily get discouraged when yours doesn’t turn out quite as beautiful. It took a while for me to let that go. I think that the advice that helped the most was in a nature journaling class, where the teacher pushed us to go straight to pen, rather than dithering for hours with pencil and eraser trying to get everything perfect. What I want is to be able to let that go, and work much faster and looser and capture the feeling of a place. The sunflower was the piece that I did during the nature journaling class. Anyway, these are some sketches I did in Puerto Rico and one from the northern CA coast. The coastal one was painted from a photo as my family would never sit for hours and wait for me to watercolor a scene. That one was before I learned to just use a pen and commit.

What's your favourite sketching tool? Is it a pen, or a pencil. Tell me in the comments below. I was taught with a pencil so it's often been my favourite tool to use until recently. In the last couple of years I've transitioned to using a ballpoint pen. This is not a fancy art pen, this is a regular Parker black medium ball point pin. The ink is beautiful, smooth, flowing black ink. Let me also makes a nice black pen. I've tried a fine balpoint, and I've tried a broad ball point, but I come back to the medium. Also, a Parker ballpoint refill is easy to get in lots of places, the cartridges last ages before they run out, and they are a standard replacement cartridge meaning that you can use these cartridges in lots of different pens. I used to only sketch with a pencil, and my favourite pencil is a soft mechanical clutch pencil. I've got one which is a 4B and a 3 mm lead which is quite thick. I used to draw with a 2 mm lead but I found it too thin. I've also tried 6 mm or 5 mm leads, they're great and they are really big.