For spread 3 of my Luchetti Sketchbook (you can see spread 1 here, if you fancy), I wanted to try some wet-in-wet techniques with watercolour. The foreground is done with gouache, but the preliminary work and the background is all watercolour.

Things I Noticed

• It worked beautifully, just the way I was hoping that it would! The paper took water exceptionally well.
• The paint did pool towards the centre crease, and in the beginning stages, it seemed like it might be a very obvious mark, but it surprised me in the end. I did edit the crease out of the final image (and I cropped it because the bench was too short and I couldn’t unsee it), but the detailled pictures below show it without any editing.
• The most important thing I learnt during this piece was that taping the borders to the covers of the book is the most remarkable thing to do. It stops any and all curling, it keeps the page perfectly flat, and there is less paint accidentally dripped on to forthcoming pages. Here is a picture of some other spreads’ tape in detail:

The Videos

The first video is sped up, but includes the entire painting process, the second is at true speed, but cut into a couple minutes of main points. Let me know which you prefer!

As if it wasn’t official before, I adore this sketchbook more with each spread (I’m working on spread 5 as of this post).