Trailbound Weekly EDITION| 001
This week’s header artwork 🎨 is brought to you by Silas Garcia (14 years old). Download the above line art here (there are two options) and we hope you’ll share your version to be featured in an upcoming weekly edition. ⏰ Weekly submission deadline = Sunday for the following week’s issue.
Hi Friends!
It sure does feel good to be reconnecting with our community this month 🤗. Thank you so much for allowing our team a little time this summer to refresh and recharge for the final push of 2025. We are very excited for the new ideas that have emerged from a month of taking stock of how far we’ve come.
We…
The top thought from a month of looking inward was how much WE, the Trailbound Community, has grown and thrived these last couple of years.
For the whole of August, so many of you shared your summer adventures, sketches, watercolor studies, and curiosities. You cheered each other on and generously shared your own experiences and knowledge within our budding Discord Channel. There has been so much kindness and color!
Moving forward, we want to encourage MORE of that! It is delightful and inspiring to see your work and to READ your stories.
Each week, we hope you find these weekly journal entries an invitation to carve out time for your own art practice, maybe connect with other artists or, if you feel comfortable doing so, share your work with us 📧. Let us know how you are doing. We LOVE hearing from you 🤗.
📰 News & Updates 🎭
This year’s 24 day Advent sketching series is inspired by the Phases of Arctic Animals Series!
Kids are back to school and we are officially plotting this year’s Advent Watercolor Series!
This year’s 24 days of painting together for the month of December is inspired by a love for painting little animals over and over again, but with a twist.
We want to know about the cute, awesome animals that call YOUR “backyard” home.
Our goal is to travel around the world by sketching one new animal a day until we create something like my Ermine print above. In order to create the traceable line-art and a pre-printed option on watercolor paper, we need to determine our list of animals by the end of September 2025.
The Trailbound Community is a global one and excited to learn about the wildlife that you have in your backyard. December will be extra fun when everyone is painting and learning together as we fill in a big picture with a whole bunch of cute animals from all around the planet!
📋 You can contribute to the list of animals by filling out this form.
🥸 Tips & Tricks & Tools 🧰
The BEST art supplies are the ones that are WITH you, like this epic mechanical pencil from our friends at WITH (not sponsored, this IS our go-to most FAVORITE pencil).
Sketching and watercolor painting, like most creative acts, can easily and quickly become bogged down by stuff. There is so much cool stuff and it’s hard not to want ALL of it, am I right? But, when it comes to what your really NEED, it’s really quite simple!
📒 A well made sketchbook or sheets of 100% cotton watercolor paper. My personal favorite paper is Hahnemühle (also NOT sponsored, I really love their paper and their commitment to sustainable paper making).
✏️ One good pencil (as mentioned above, WITH mechanical pencils are sturdy and super versatile).
🖊️ One or two waterproof pens (I've had great success with these three brands = Micron, Faber Castell (what my grandmother Lu used) and Sharpie.)
🖌️ A water brush (There is a great conversation about this in our Discord Channel under #brushes)
🪣 Something to hold water, can be anything! This is the one I’ve been using for years, and shockingly have NOT lost!
🖌️ A travel brush (or three). I like to use a size 8 round with a nice point and have gone so far to create my own, which is included with each order of Trail Tiles while supplies last. But when I am NOT using that one and only brush — I am a HUGE fan of the entire Rosemary Travel Brush Collection.
🎨 Portable paint palette. Right now I am currently working back and forth between TWO Art Toolkit Palettes = A Blue Pocket Palette + our Red Trailbound “Paint It Forward” Demi Palette.
The paint brand and colors we carry is personal and to each their own.
A wonderful place to talk about all things paint and color is on Discord under “🖌️ Art Supplies & Materials” within the #paint channel. @TinaKramer recently shared her latest color experiments (see above).
Playing with ALL the paint is the best part and we really want to encourage you to be curious, experiment and have fun deciding what brand and the colors that help you paint what you feel.
My late grandmother Lu really enjoyed using Windsor & Newton. For a LONG time I only used Holbein, but have since come to enjoy using a lot of different brands like Daniel Smith and M. Graham (which is my favorite in-studio at present, SO flow-y).
Choosing exact colors is so hard! There are way too many to choose from, but here’s a good generally rule of thumb for those just starting out — start with a set of colors that represent a “Split Primary” which include complementing warm and cool REDS, YELLOWS and BLUES.
Here’s an example:
Cadmium Red (WARM) + Quinacridone Red (COOL)
Cadmium Yellow (WARM) + Hansa Yellow (COOL)
Ultramarine (WARM) + Phthalo Blue (COOL)
Overtime you WILL find that you gravitate to some colors, too! Those colors can kind of become your “signature color palette.” For example, I NEVER leave home without INDIGO in my palette and so many of you associate Trailbound to the color Indigo! Maybe red, too!?! 🤔
🎨 Community Inspiration 🎨
Filling In The Blank Page — Trailbound Community Art Series
A couple weeks ago we had two hot air balloons pass right in front of our deck… after “dipping” a bit into the lake. They are not usually on “our” side of the lake so it was pretty exciting. I used my photo for my inspiration.
I took all the houses along the lake out of my painting…and moved the mountain in. I love how I can move mountains when I paint.🤣 That’s the way I wish it looked.😊
The hot air balloons go for sunrise and sunset… wind and weather permitting.
Teresa Dudik / Trailbound Community Artist
Filling In The Blank Page — Trailbound Community Art Series
Backstory, one of our endangered resident orca pods returned to the Salish Sea after being away for 10 months! I watched on a webcam located in the San Juan Islands wishing I could be there. The wildfire smoke coupled with the sunset made for bonkers light conditions. What a fun way to memorialize their return to home waters.
Joe Griffin-Harte / Trailbound Community Artist
💛 Paint It Forward 🎁
“I visited Grand Portage National Monument this past week. Made friends with a Park Service Ranger and gave this to them of an American Redstart I had seen on the trail. It was a beautiful bird to see!” ~ Trailbound Discord Artist @Laurie 💛
🖼️ Share Your Artwork ✍🏼
What will YOU fill your blank page with? ⏰ Weekly submission deadline = Sunday for the following week’s issue.
🤖 Share with our private Trailbound Community in our Discord Server (invites delivered via email).
🔖 Tag @trailboundsketches on Instagram
📨 eMail us at create[AT]trailboundsketches[DOT]com
💌 snail mail your letters and art for Max to Trailbound LLC, PO Box 140124, Anchorage, AK 99514
👕 Pick up a Trailbound Sketches Shirt at our new Bonfire Store Front!
🖼️ If you love what we do and would like to support our work — Buying art prints goes a long way at covering the cost of creating free YouTube watercolor tutorials. Payment plan options are now available, too.
Stay curious! Have fun! Paint it forward!
Thank you for being a member of the Trailbound Community!
~ Team Trailbound 🎨
