I am enjoying an online class with Sydney Australia urban sketcher, Liz Steel. Her classes are excellent, chock-full of information, demos, feedback, and I enjoy posting sketches in her virtual classroom and getting feedback from people around the world. The class I am taking now is “Sketchbook Design”, and if you have ever felt challenged in making interesting sketchbook spreads, this is the class for you! We’ve been working with different elements this past week, so I’ll share a couple sketches using text and borders. I like borders, I find they can frame the piece nicely and use up white space. One sketch I did was of flowers in a vase. It stood on the page alone, but a border helped complete the sketch:
I also added the text on the side as part of the border, which made it fun too. Another sketch I did was on location at a local outdoor mall. Built to look like a street of shops, I have sketched several times at Woodbury Lakes. I parked and looked around for subjects, and as usual, bright store awnings caught my eye. I sketched the store fronts, then had a half blank page, so decided to add text about the area and the logo. With a border, I think it really pulled a ho-hum sketch together!
Borders can be a powerful tool and I am working to develop their uses in my sketches. Try it out for yourself, see how you can use borders to make an engaging sketch!