Parenting finds me with a 90 minute slot without distractions in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham each week through the autumn. Here are two sketches drawn sitting outside St Paul’s church. The first was drawn mostly blind (looking at the scene and drawing by feel) in pen and then touched up with water and a limited palette of six watercolour pencils.
The second was supposed to deconstruct the scene into a few sweeps of the crayon but then I drew over it with a 6B graphite stick, adjusted with an eraser.
The stones are having fun in the first version, but have been caught and are stiff to attention in the second, though one has sloped off somewhere.
kestrelart 
I really like the mood in the first one! Very alive!
It’s good to see two versions of the same scene.
I like the denser trees in the second one and the background buildings’ texture on the first one. How strange the stones re-ordered themselves!
It’s just how I started the sketch. In the first I was drawing blind but at lines focusing on the arrangement of the stones. The second was supposed to be simplified as a few blocks of crayon when I started it, and the stones were drawn in simple upward strokes. Then I drew over this. In hindsight, I should have drawn without minding the underlying blocks, going over the edges, but I allowed the blocks to shape the drawing. It’s all exercises. I had in mind that workshop we did, with the idea of drawing in textures over a pre coloured surface. It perhaps needed smoother paper.
That was a good workshop.
The first sketch for me has a vitality that got lost in the second – and it looks like you had a tidy up of the churchyard as well. Perhaps overworking should only be applied to specific areas rather than the whole image – just for emphasis.
I think you are spot on.
I like the idea that it looks like I tidied up the churchyard in between the sketches.
It’s because I changed plans in the second and, exactly as you say, overworked it.
Thanks
Yeah, I’m no stranger to the art of overworking myself.
🙂
These need a haunting!
From where I’m sitting both works appear meritworthy…. both are very different…. I wouldn’t say one is better than the other… different feelings give rise to differences in treatment and the human “soul” (for want of a better word) is ever on the move. Are those office blocks above and behind the church?
Thanks
Yes offices or flats, rectangular space anyway
Love the first one – so spontaneous and flowing 🙂
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