Travel sketches

Well, the armchair variety, anyway! I didn't want to say it out loud, but doing travel sketches in colour was one of my New Year's resolutions. It seems indecently hasty by my normal standards (not to mention immodest) to say, on January 11th, that I feel I've made some significant progress. I had given myself a timescale of months and maybe years! It's not correct, I know, to say these are travel sketches but I went through my photo albums this week to practice and get a feel for it. I tried to do these quickly and tried to imagine which scenes I would most likely have wanted to draw and how much time I might have had. I know from my carnets de voyage, that using photography to colour in scenes afterwards is common practice so I'm going to include things that I might sketch on the spot and colour later.

I started with watercolours and as usual, I overworked them. (Not shown here!) I also realised immediately that watercolours - with the palette, water container, brushes, paper towels etc. - are really quite difficult to manage on a lap and as sitting my be a luxury, I can't imagine how anyone manages them 'in the field'!

I'm not a fan of looking back and I don't use photos very much these days but I felt I needed to go back to basics, to what worked for me, in order to break through the barrier I've had with watercolours. I have no desire to draw or paint landscapes or still life, as is usually taught at watercolour class so I thought about what I wanted to achieve, what subjects appeal most of all and what scale I'm comfortable with but most importantly - forget about making progress and 'just do it'. Well, after the first few disasters, struggling to make them look light and loose and with getting the pigment ratio right and fighting some absorbant paper I thought I'd try out the Museum watercolour leads again. Mentioned before but here they are again.












I've included a pencil and Cretacolour pencil on the left for comparison. The watercolour leads are very thin and hard and come with a lead holder which has an in-built sharpener. I've been using them without the holder as I find it very heavy and unbalanced - it feels as if the centre of gravity is somewhere at the top. So after feeling very disappointed with the watercolours I finally gave in to the leads. I'm sure my brain works differently to most people's because I've resisted using pencils to apply colour as I knew I would enjoy it and most likely find it easier than painting! Also, I hadn't really found a coloured pencil that has the same feel as graphite - until I discovered these leads. They feel very hard like my graphite pencils and the pigment dissolves completely, unlike other watercolour pencils I've tried, but the real advantage of these over paint is that without the holder, these are extremely light and portable, just like my pencils. And what's more, I can apply water later if I want that effect. Ah, but there is just one, rather significant, disadvantage - they only come in these 18 colours. I'm going to have to learn how to mix them!




















The drawing at the top of the post was done first. The bird (I don't know it's name) I'm most happy with as that was drawn very fast. It was photographed in an enclosure so it could realistically be captured on paper, they don't move around so much. Down from that is Paul, on a beach. It was drawn quickly but I don't think this sort of portrait would be easy from life. And below, Paul and Alex feeding fish from the back of a boat on the Great Barrier Reef. Here I had trouble mixing the leads to get a good skin tone. Their skin was tanned and there was a lot of reflected light and deep shadows. The kaola and kangeroos would be very easy to capture as these were photographed in an enclosure and the animals didn't move about much.

So I'm going to continue with this for a while. It's very interesting to go through the photos with an eye for drawing - I'm spotting things I didn't notice at the time like, for instance, how long this koala's claws are! I still want to improve my painting but for the first time I think I'd like to try mixing media. Of course, I have a way to go but I'm finding that my normal perfectionist tendancies are not kicking in with this type of drawing as it has been doing with the watercolours.