Hahnemulhe

Galapagos Beginnings

For my summer travels I will journey to a long sought after destination: the Galapagos.

I plan to bring two journals for my 10 day cruise around the islands: one Stillman & Birn Beta hardbound and a Hahnemühle 100% Cotton panoramic journal. I have used both before on previous trips and I hope to fill all the pages like Darwin noodling away in his journals.

I like narrowing my journals to just two, like the two banks of a river that contains yet gives direction to my sketches. Will the scene before fit within the dimensions of the paper? I sure will try and if my lines run out of room, it’s just part of the sketch.

These two journals have been on many trips in the past few years. I love the format and the quality paper.

My first page in my Stillman & Birn journal is usually a map. With this map I include a portrait of man who is all over the Galapagos: Charles Darwin. He visited the otherworldly islands in 1835 as the naturalist on the HMS Beagle. And I drew one of Darwin’s finches: the woodpecker finch. (Featured sketch).

Darwin formulated much of his thoughts for his groundbreaking Origin of Species on his five year cruise on the Beagle and his observations and collections on the Galapagos.

Before any trip I never want to go in blind. I want to learn about my future destination and it’s history, flora, and fauna. Before heading south towards the Equator, I read Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner (1995).

This Pulitzer winning book profiles the research of the Peter and Rosemary Grant on the tiny Galapagos island of Daphne Major. There research highlighted evolution in action with the beak lengths of “Darwin’s” finches.

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Beginnings: Point and Shoot Journals

A new adventure means a new sketchbook.

In the past few years my “go to” travel sketchbooks has always been Stillman & Birn Beta or Delta Series. I love the paper and the different sizes in both soft and hard covers.

Now I wanted to try a new sketchbook so I settled on Hahnemulhe’s 100% cotton cold press sketchbook. This is a hardcover book with very high quality paper for watercolor.

For Svalbard I want to downsize, so I chose two journals: a 4″ by 5.5″ panoramic journal and a 5.5″ by 5.5″ square journal. These would fit in well with my lighter one-bag travel ethic and, I thought, if you use a smaller journal, you are encouraged to sketch more because you have less paper to cover. I figured a smaller journal would be easier to do quick, gestural-loose sketches while on my polar cruise. I think of them as my “point and shoot” journals. I still could do detailed sketches with many watercolor washes, but I like the versatility of these journals and I can’t wait to take them to Scandinavia and sketch!

For my opening sketch in the square journal, I chose to paint across the gutter giving me a panoramic spread of 5.5″ by 11″. The spread is the isbjorn (Norwegian for polar bear). This is the number one target mammal on any Svalbard cruise. I loved the way the 100% cotton paper handled the washes (featured sketch).

The introductory sketch of my smaller panoramic journal was the number one target on my bird list: the much sought after ivory gull. This all white gull is only found in the Arctic Polar region. Finding an all white gull in an all white landscape was going to be a challenge! But I was up for it (Bring it on!)

Point and Shoot Watercolor Journals.