Allow me to give you a tour through my completed miniature watercolour sketchbook. There’s a whole world of artistic expression captured in these tiny watercolour pages. In this adventure through miniature watercolour sketches, I’ll guide you through intricate details, share insights, and introduce you to the captivating art form of creating and painting in miniature sketchbooks.

Miniature Watercolour Sketchbook: Making Things Manageable

I’m a huge advocate for painting small. It’s ideal for:

• Painting on the go.
• Dealing with overwhelm.
• Practicing a technique without feeling like you’re ‘wasting’ big (expensive) paper.
• Trying out an idea without feeling like you’re ‘wasting’ big (expensive) paper.
• Honing compositional skills – you need to be selective about what to include as it literally won’t all fit!

Tiny sketchbooks beckon you to explore, create, and immerse yourself in a world of pint-sized artistry, and that’s what I did here. I worked on this book in January and February 2022, when the ideas were brewing for the class that eventually became Watercolor for Beginners: How to Add Depth & Form through Layering. Aside from messing around, I used this book to practice layering to create depth in flowers and landscapes, which is what most of the book is filled with.

Flowers, Hills, and Dragons

I painted the landscape first. This was straight out of my imagination (as the tiny dragon in the upper right probably suggests) with just two colours: a pink, and a dark blue for the shadows. I laid the pink down wet-on-wet in the background. Then I built up progressive layers of shadows with the blue on these made-up mountains to give the image depth.

The bluebells were painted later, from a reference that I think I took myself. Here I was experimenting with different level of precision vs looseness in the image. What sort of details were needed to make the specific type of flower clear, and how many layers did it take? That’s what I was working through with this painting.

My Favourite Centrefold

(Can I get away with writing that…?)

*cough* Anyway… There’s a moody landscape oil painting at a relative’s house that I adore. Every time I’m there that piece draws me in. It inspired me to try to capture something of that wonderful moody lighting myself with watercolours, and this is the closest I’ve managed so far.

I used layers of Potters Pink, very watery Naples Yellow, and (I think) a watery Cobalt Blue.

I quite like painting across two pages in a sketchbook. There’s something a bit irreverent about going right over that page divide and that pleases me. It’s not something you can do on ‘proper’ painting paper and is one of the charms of working in a sketchbook.

Hydrangea

I have a soft spot for hydrangea and have painted and drawn them several times over the years.

I even framed this one (my favourite) and it’s up on my own wall.

But anyway, back to those hydrangea in my miniature sketchbook:

This was another experiment with looseness and layering – how to pull out the essential “hydrangea-ness” of them without painting every single petal. I rather like how this turned out, even if this approach didn’t make it into my layering class. Perhaps it will find it’s way into a future class.

Thank you for accompanying me on this little tour through my miniature watercolour sketchbook. If you’d like to see all the pages, check out the complete narrated tour on YouTube. Like the sketchbook, the tour is pretty mini too – just over 4 minutes long:

And if you’re interested in delving deeper and starting your own exploration of watercolour art or you fancy trying your hand at making your own mini sketchbooks, be sure to check out my Skillshare classes:

Make Miniature Books: Bookbinding for Beginners
Watercolor for Beginners: How to Add Depth & Form through Layering

If you don’t already have a Skillshare account and you sign up with these links it gives you one month’s free access to thousands of classes (you can cancel before the month is up without incurring a charge) – this also gives me a referral bonus. Check out all my Skillshare classes.