Realisation of Ipad sketch in ink and pastel, on balcony in shade, listening to Spotify classical guitar daily mix.
Category Archives: Sketches – Experimental Drawing
art by committee
Should I:
- Place large stripe of orange paint across the picture
- Drown it in sepia ink, white gouache, ground charcoal and water and leave to dry slowly
- Guillotine into vertical strips and re-arrange
- All of the above
bound
Re-purposing II
This is how this picture now sits after working into the distant moor and cliff faces with sandpaper, knife, pumice, washes of sepia ink and a dusting of conte crayon. I have accentuated the highlights of the water and brought the tide further inland. The next challenge is the foreground which needs more respect. I like the textures that arose from the netting but want to wash over the white and bright green, and shape the near slopes more. I need to unite foreground and background into one image and that means, in part, stripping off the clean white sea I seem now to have painted. I have a photo showing grass heads – but how much now should I follow the photo?
Here is a gallery of images of this one scene on St Abbs Head in the Scottish coast, drawn originally in July 2013, some original field sketches and some in various stages of re-purposing.
Re-purposing
This was painted in July 2014. I sat on the bluff of St Abbs Head looking down on the series of inlets from the sea forming Pettico Wick. I worked on board with charcoal and pastel, lifting and scrambling the fragments with very wet sepia ink and gouache. Despite all my contrivance, the board whipped in the wind, striking me paint-side on my face, and flew to land paint-side down in the damp grass. I scoured into it with hard eraser and knife, revealing the under-surface to define the crags. It dried to muted muddied tones in the boot of the car, and has languished in a box for the last year.
Last weekend, I pulled it out again and wondered how to develop it – to experiment with its surface but keep something of the chaos of its making. I worked back in with conte crayon to refresh the colours and refloated the pigment in water and inks. I sought to control the wet mix by layering it with netting, restraining the fluid from covering the central highlight and holding the puddles to evaporate on the image rather than pour over the side.
I have painted in a low sky, giving definition to the distant coast and a sense of scale to the whole piece. Here it is photographed by lamp and by day light.
It took a week to dry out and I am ready to work into it again. I think I will next use knife and sandpaper to regain some of the earlier layer, particularly in the rocks forming the coastline. Then I will paint successive dilute acrylic glazes over the grass and heather to bring some coherence to the higher land.
How would you develop this? I would welcome advice and suggestions.
Chord progression
I re-suspended the loose charcoal in the picture posted previously in very wet white gouache. White and Prussian blue acrylic were applied in selected areas. The white acrylic pushed the gouache wash away whereas the blue slowly bled into it. The migrating washes (below) were left to dry overnight and then the whole layer fixed (above).
The music was by Elena Kats-Chernin, the haunting Works for Piano Trio.
I am thinking how to draw back into this.
Wood for trees II
In the experimental drawing workshop, the instruction was “cover a big sheet with chalk pastel”.
Why?
To build layers, drawing, smearing, wetting, fixing, drawing again.
Others made patterns and abstracts. I still had in my head the image of the fallen tree set against the backlit foliage. I did not particularly wish to create a recognisable landscape piece but it was a start.
I reached a point where I wanted to disintegrate the picture I had started. I ran it under the tap, placed more paper on top and walked on it. Actually, the underlying image was rather resilient.
The print was interesting though.
At home, I rebuilt the picture from scratch, in just three colours, cobalt blue, rose and aurolean.
punched metal
In the experimental drawing workshops, we worked on two pieces in parallel. The first started as straight non-overlapping lines in charcoal and was posted as “Wildcode“. The second was built from curved lines, always reserving an area of paper free of carbon stains. This was then stored on a rack. When I looked at it a week later, it had acquired an imprint of a piece of metal that was more interesting than the original drawing. I built on that in charcoal layers, then throwing white gouache at it. This is fixed and photographed. I have cropped and tinted the image using Artrage on the iPad.
Punched metal.
Blade of rock II: guano platforms
I had one more day at St Abbs. The evening before, I planned an experiment. I would cover the paper in a simple wash and build in the shape of the jutting rock simply using white and sepia ink for the guano and shadows and teeming birds in the air and dotted on the sea. The rest would be left with the wash showing through.
As the rock became submerged, it took a muted golden hue as shown. I photographed this on site (lower image) before the next drastic step of putting in the shadow and reflection (upper image). I think this deeper tone was needed to ground the rock but on reflection it should have been done more delicately. I unintentionally obscured the fractal line made by the yellow spreading into the blue wash.
For completeness, this was my first attempt.
kestrelart 