On holiday

I’ve been on holiday and now honeymoon – it’s been pretty busy and I haven’t had the time to sit down and work properly. But I did a little. Here it is – the Church of St.Michael and All Angels in Hawkshead, Cumbria,England,UK, Europe.

This is the complete line work- I’m using a waterproof rollerball on heavy watercolour paper, because I want the stiffness and texture of it. What I’m trying to do here is establish all the tone with the rollerball, and then apply coloured pencil to it as though they were a watercolour wash, trying to avoid adding much tone – it was a grey, shadowless day today.

Next try

So my attempt yesterday ended up like this:

I am greatly displeased with this. I’m putting it on the blog as an effort
towards artistic transparency – even basic works of art are often revised and redone completely. Also, I wanted to show that I don’t always just chuck ideas that aren’t working, I also try to finish ideas to see if I can learn something from the effort – in this case I learned a little more about using markers (better ventilation, also using like you’re cell shading).
Personally, a good 90% of my work is tests, experiments, half-baked ideas that I play with, revisions, reworking and totally starting again. I don’t think I am alone in this, judging from the similar sentiments I have heard from other artists. For me, a sketchbook is often a graveyard of dead and aborted ideas that never quite became something, as well as a hardcopy record of old spare parts of ideas that I can recycle. It’s why I don’t throw away used up sketchbooks – if I get stuck for ideas I can mine my offcuts and old parts for the germ of an idea, and rework it with my since-improved skills.
Anyway, this morning I am starting again, with a fresh page and some pencils – the old-fashioned way. Here’s what I have already:

Tom Waits Portrait

Recently I read about the aux trois crayons techniques used by artists from the renaissance using the
Materials easily available then – white chalk, sanguine and charcoal. While this wasn’t new to me, since I’ve read about it before, this was the first time that I’ve thought about it seriously. I decided to give it a shot with the materials I had to hand, which is to say, some pastel paper and a little set off Jackson’s brand coloured chalks. Though I thought that I would have to make do with the wrong colours, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the little set had a yellow ochre, sanguine and an actually decent black. The little half stick were chunkier than I could have wished for fine detailed faces, but they’d be good for just about anything else, and despite their cheapness, they offer surprisingly good string colours.

Linked here

I’m not especially proud of this work as it was just a quick sketch to test the medium and technique, which I think it did quite well. With more time taken and better materials, I think this would be a nice medium and technique for just about any application, providing portability and a strong limited palette, but more tonal and warmth options than charcoal or pencil.