Category: Part 3

For this exercise I used a photograph I’d taken of the view from my parent’s garden looking out past their hedge and across town to the hills behind. I used watercolour and black ink, diluting the ink and using soft blues for elements of the landscape which were further away, with pure black and richer colours in the foreground. The next door house sits in the middle ground. I think as an exercise in these three distances it works well to differentiate between the three and the mass of black is very effective but this picture I like less now than when I had first finished it, I’m not so keen on the appearance of the next door house and garden – I don’t think the shading has worked so well there – it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the picture.  Still overall I think it’s reasonably successful and what it does have I think is that early morning soft hazy light so I’m pleased with that.

In this exercise we were asked to look at the preparatory drawings in the previous exercises and produce a composition using elements from those drawings. I still had the romance of the view from my cousin’s house in France at the forefront of my mind and wanted to use that as a basis but incorporate the rolling charcoal clouds that I’d been so pleased with in the cloud exercise. I decided to echo that style in the rolling hills and woodland and was really pleased with the results. I hadn’t really tried working from preparatory drawings or composing images in this way before and it felt quite exciting. This was charcoal and ink on A3.

I did this exercise twice, once from life in France doing very quick sketches using a really simple bit of colouring in watercolour and then pen, and then again working from photos I’d taken for purpose up on Hampstead Heath in drawing pen having felt that the first batch didn’t really work. I actually now feel like apart from the first France drawing where I didn’t really know what I was doing and did a very bad drawing and tried to include too much detail – they do work, but I’m really glad I did the second lot as they are some of my more competent drawings!

France:

Hampstead Heath:

In these Hampstead pictures I really like the sense of space – there is a lot of white paper which maybe I avoid generally, but with the more intense worked up areas works really well. I also really like the almost print like quality that the big splashes of colour have in the France images and I think you can see that they were drawn from life – they feel like a hot summers day whereas the Hampstead shots are very still and have a totally different quality.

In this exercise I experimented different media to try and capture clouds – here are four very different examples, the first and second dealing with big fluffy clouds in the midday sun and the third and fourth looking at wispy clouds around sunset.
As I was doing these I hated all but the second drawing in charcoal and ink, but looking at them now there are elements I like in each of them.
1. Pastel and marker, A4.
Initially I didn’t like how cartoony the marker made this but looking at it now I think it’s really softened by the messiness of the pastel and I like the way they work against each other. This was a relatively still, hot day and I think some of that comes across.

2. Charcoal, ink and white acrylic ink.
I so enjoyed doing this one and I love it just as much now. There is so much movement in these clouds – I’d love to try this on a bigger scale, I can see it working particularly well as a large scale series.

3. Oil pastel, A4.
Again I hated this while I was doing it and in the few days following I couldn’t see any merit – it seemed too wishy washy – however it was a fairly accurate representation of the sky on that day and actually I quite the style now – it still maintains some of the energy that I like.

4. Fine-liner and marker, A4.
This is probably my least favourite but more because of the cityscape which looks cartoonish and poorly done. The clouds themselves give quite a nice flavour – it might be nice to try this style over block watercolour if I get a chance to get rid of some of that white.

This study (A3) was done in watercolour and oil pastels, I wanted to try to keep up a bit of colour work and play with oil pastels a little more as I’d only really touched on them in the previous part. They are such a playful medium and bring out a really illustrative style in me which I think in this instance works quite well. I was trying particularly to look at light and colour use – using blues predominantly rather than black for the shadows.

The only tree that differed species-wise was the one in the foreground which had much more visible texture so it was quite easy to mark out just because of the proximity.
I found it really helpful to use the watercolour underneath to give the impression of the receding trees and allow some white for the gaps between, this and the deep blues of the shadows at the forest floor gave space and depth. This style made it quite easy to simplify  and still give an impression of the foliage etc. but it is very illustrative and had I used inks and charcoal I might have been able to produce a much finer more delicate image, it would be nice to try that approach too at some point if the opportunity arises.

Around the time of this exercise I went to Epping forest camping with friends which was pretty great timing! In Ottilie’s naps me and my brother went out sketching, this first image was my first attempt – the difficulty with sketching in a forest is that it’s very difficult to get a view of the entire tree! I also found the quick sketch much more difficult and it turned out more like an observational study. It was brilliant however for awakening my enthusiasm – I’d really had very little interest in drawing trees before this but drawing this one I suddenly saw how like it is to drawing a body with all the bulges and peculiarities, something I’ve always loved.

Another really brilliant thing about sketching with my brother was being able to see how he drew – he’s a brilliant draftsman and he uses the pencil in a completely different way to me – often using it’s side which I hadn’t done before. The next day we went out again this time sketching a big tree on the edge of our campsite and I tried a different approach and was so pleased with the results.

I then had a go at the larger observational study and went for pen and ink,

I loved this, again I couldn’t get the whole tree but I built on the previous sketches and felt like I got it’s personality well with all it’s crags and crevices.

A couple of weeks later I found an isolated tree in a park and revisited the skethces exercise as I didn’t feel I’d followed it to the letter and wanted another go where I could see the  shape of the whole tree. I don’t like these drawings half as much but I did find them really useful for building confidence, understanding the structure and seeing my own development. Unfortunately I had to cut the last sketch short but the difference between that and the first of these four sketches is so vast I think it’s still useful to include.