Click here to check if anything new just came in.
April 09 2012
Travel Sketchbook: London, the first two days
Stoke Newington, wash added at home.
Notes from the 'Forrests, Rocks, Torrents' exhibition at the National Gallery, and a London cliché..
The first fold out spread in this book, mostly people drawn on the bus.
The back of this fold out, drawings manipulated at home and layered.
More people on the bus.
I put on the gouache grounds after I had sketched with a Rotring Art Pen (watersoluble ink), and before I used a Pentel Brushpen. I find it interesting how the gouache absorbs some of the india ink and influences its color.
Sudden rain burst in Soho, I couldn't find effective cover but wanted to draw anyway...
Stoke Newington.
March 29 2012
March 28 2012
Travel Sketchbook: Second Day in Dolgellau
While in Dolgellau again, I was still very obviously influenced by that little book of drawings by Charles Rennie Mackintosh I had bought earlier.
This is the first of the travel sketchbooks I bound myself – and I bound into some of them the luxury of extra space in the form of occasional fold out pages, as you can see in the last two images.
March 27 2012
Studies in Memory and Repetition
I’m trying to dig deeper into my visual memory and to sharpen my perception of values. I’m experimenting with ways to make a more active use of my memory in my drawings, for example by coloring them from memory, or not drawing on location as much as just look at location, and then go home and draw from memory, or to make one drawing on location and another one back home, either with or without looking at the one made on location.
The ideas for this come from a few different sources – Loriann Signori’s blog, Nicolaïdes‘ The Natural Way to Draw (which I still regard as the best book on drawing I ever laid my eyes on), and some remarks on Turner’s sketching technique (he is said to often have only made pencil sketches on location, and filled in the colors from memory or imagination when he was back in his room).
Also, I tend to go drawing early in the morning, and it can still be damn cold at that time, and doing the washes at home gives me warmth and more control. Funny enough, the increased control that comes from working on a table and having two free hands means I can let the washes move around more freely, use more water.
P.S. Last year I wrote this lengthy posting about finding that some of my favorite watercolors by artists like Turner, Wyeth, Hopper and Sargent were done, or at least could have been done, with very few different paints, achieving their splendor through the subtle gradations of those very few paints. I am still intrigued by this – you can see in the second Turner copy above that it only uses two colors, a yellow and a blue/violet. I guess I’ll be digging for a long time.
March 26 2012
Travel Sketchbook: Cadar Idris
Morning sun on a tree growing over an old wall made of rough stones.
... but later it started raining here, too, and kept on for most of the rest of the day. I decided to walk on and draw anyway, but had to give up about half way up, being all cold, wet and misty. People coming down told me you didn't see anything but fog from the summit anyway...
March 23 2012
March 22 2012
Spring Drawings from the Pencil Side
From my current sketchbook, all except the first from the side for dry media. Time and again I find that I do love pencil, even if the ink stuff is so much flashier on first sight. There is a deepness to pencil, the variety of tonal values possible in one and the same stroke, the possibilities of softness and precision. Oh, and I always wish that this phase of spring, where most trees are still bare but there are buds everywhere would last longer. So much to draw, so little time! Once all the leaves have unfolded they become so much less interesting to me.
March 21 2012
March 20 2012
Travel Sketchbook: Llandderfel/Bala
While hitchhiking from Aberystwyth to Bala I happened upon a wonderful used bookshop in Machynlleth, and found a book on Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s drawings. I had been looking for one on amazon.de for a long time, but never found anything I could actually afford. Even in the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, which houses the largest collection of his drawings and sketchbooks (and has now thankfully made them available online), I had not been able to find a good, or even just any, book about them! But now I had, and you can tell I spent a lot of time looking at his plant drawings the night before I did some of those below…
March 19 2012
March 15 2012
More March Sketches and a Double Sketchbook
Page 10.
These are from the same sketchbook as the last posting, but it is a twofold sketchbook: It is half made from very bright, almost blueish Dorée 200 drawing paper, whose color I love, which is a good paper for dry media, and I have a 50 m roll lying around under my desk which will last me forever (and only cost around 70 €). This paper also sucks beyond the telling of it for watercolor or even slight ink washes, and the brush pen doesn’t go on quite as smooth as I would like. So the other half of the book is made of my favourite drawing paper ever, the Fabriano Disegno F4, which is a tiny bit warmer in its color, also very smooth, and although it isn’t advertised for wet media at all, takes them surprisingly well. In fact, for most things I prefer it to ‘real’ watercolor paper even if working heavily with watercolor. It is also way more expensive than the Dorée, and I’m buying it in loose sheets these days because I can’t afford the big packs. Oh well. Anyway, I’m using this book starting from both sides (the page numbers with ‘b’ are from the Disegno side, the regular numbers from the Dorée side), and will meet myself in the middle somewhere. I still like the format. I can actually imagine sticking to this square size for a couple of years.
These landscape sketches are inspired by the wonderful drawings of Fred, by the way, like this one. So many possibilities lie in his treatment of wash and bleeding, so much still to learn for me! But some of it might have to wait for next winter, when the landscape gets empty again and the trees bare.
P.S. If you click on page 05b you’ll see some strange textures in the brown on the right side. That’s what happens when a wash freezes on the page. I love it, I just wish I could play around with that effect more without freezing myself. I’ve drawn this place many times before, and encountered the same problem last winter, as you can see here. And of course I forgot to buy a heating pad in time, and now spring is just around the corner and I don’t feel like I’ll use it often enough to buy one now. I think I should make a note in my calendar, maybe for October or so: “get a heating pad and fingerless gloves.”
March 07 2012
First Post Travel Sketchbook
My travel sketchbooks were of various sizes and formats, not one exactly like any of the others. When I came back I started producing drawings for my exhibition on single sheets of paper so they could be framed, also it was cold and I wasn’t spending much time out and about, so for a while I didn’t have a sketchbook at all. Now I’ve made a new one, and I think I’ve found a format that will be ‘home’ for a while: more or less square, big enough to splash around with some color and layer drawings, but not too big to hold in my hand in the windy outsides…
March 06 2012
People on Public Transport in February
Sketch of people on public transport
P.S. This drawing is for sale here.
February 03 2012
Lots of People on Public Transport in January
I’ve been looking for a way to make my public transport drawings ‘exhibitable’, take them out o sketchbooks somehow, mostly by using folded single sheets of different sizes, like here. This is another attempt, not just putting the people on a single sheet, but trying to convey the feeling of looking through a whole sketchbook, while it still being a flat piece that I can hang on a wall and that could possibly be framed. It is 1,50 m long and about 24 cm high, and I really recommend that you click on it and look at the full resolution file, there is way more to see here than fits in a 620 px width!
I’m happy how this turned out, and I think it will have a good place hanging in a café. I hope somebody will look up sometime and get lost in my big little drawing, and then be surprised how late it already is…
Piece for my upcoming exhibition, trying to convey the feeling of flipping through a sketchbook on a single piece of paper. A piece of paper that is 150 cm long! Viewing in 'original' size recommended.
January 26 2012
Watching it Grow
Every day there are more roots sprouting, the old ones a bit longer already.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
