Blue Blues

8/12/25 Whole Foods cafe

I just passed the halfway point in a dark blue Uglybooks. It’s the first time I’ve used this color as my daily-carry sketch journal, and I have to admit, it’s a tough one. Coloring highlights instead of shading is a brain buster, but that’s a challenge I enjoy. My struggle is with black and gray. Although I love the way white and some high-contrast acrylic markers pop against the blue, the contrast isn’t strong enough with dark inks. I could just forego black and gray in this book, and I might eventually, but in the meantime, I’m trying different approaches.

8/14/25

The page spread (above) I made at the Whole Foods café the other day is my favorite approach so far. Instead of forcing conventional shading and highlights, I stuck with line drawings and overlapped white and black. 

Although I figured the paper would be too dark to use with colored pencils, I tried a still life (right) using a white pencil first as a base before applying other colors over it. With that technique, the colors popped well enough – better than I expected.