Sketching on cards on the subway
Tokyo's winters are mild compared to Ohio where I was raised, but even here I don't enjoy sketching outdoors in the cold weather, and I have less control over my cold fingers.
And I discovered that Ueno Zoo moves many of my favorite sketching animals indoors where they are not fully visible.
So I abandoned zoo sketching for the winter, and focused on my other sketching activity which was subway sketching.
I continued to use my convenient leather pocket jotters that hold blank business cards (meishi in Japanese).
And I continued to use my Maruzen Arts "Thumb Holders" (which I wrote about a few pages earlier) with 3.0mm 4B leads for those expressive lines that I love.
I also added a Faber Castell TK-FINE GRIP mechanical pencil that has a 0.5mm 4B lead for fine hatching and a few light construction lines to get me started. It also has a nice long retractable eraser that extends with a twist which I use a lot to clean up stray lines.
I don't always use the Faber-Castell because usually a sharpened 3.0mm pencil is all I need. But sometimes I like to get really fine hatch lines at the end of the sketch, and don't want to stop to sharpen my lead again.
Since my subway sketching only happens during my commute to and from work, the volume of sketches has decreased as I don't go to work every day now that I'm technically retired.
Going with pencil only
In the above photo from January you'll notice that two of my sketches were not colored. That's because I loved the pencil hatch lines so much that I didn't want to obscure them with watercolor.
The following month I realized that most of my pencil sketches looked better with no watercolor because the space between the pencil hatch lines retain their sparkle.
So by the third month I finally (and reluctantly) abandoned watercolor completely and focused on pencil lines.
I also discovered that sticking to pencil only makes good sense in a subway because there is less juggling of tools; a pencil and jotter were all I needed.
Now there was no need to use the nicer paper that takes watercolor, so I switched to cheap plain paper business cards which can be bought in packs at the local 100 yen shops (similar to the dollar shops in America).
Cheap blank cards are great because I don't mind throwing them away if a sketch fails, which often happens when my model gets up and leaves the train just as I am starting the sketch.
Also, now I can use the same jotter for quick scribbled memos and notes as well as sketches.
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