Part Five: Exercise 5:2

This exercise is fairly reminiscent of one I produced for Drawing 1 many moons ago. In a nutshell, produce a study of a walk five minutes from your house. This culminated as the course text suggests in, five diluted Black sketches on postcard sized paper along with five watercolour sketches at the same size.

In truth, I currently don’t go out in the real world painting much, I find it daunting sketching in public, much easier to take a quick snap on the phone for reference. My downfall is that I don’t translate that thought quick enough to a sketchbook further so the moment in some respects is lost, as is the thought process.

That said, this is the first exercise in some time that I actually committed to sketchbook rather than germinating the idea in the head then running with it. Although, my view is that the use of found images on this course has subconsciously given me an excuse not to use the sketchbooks more. First up are the diluted Black ink sketches on A5 Sketchbook paper – tinted with a pale Yellow Ochre wash…

The image to the right was my first sketch – No. 39’s Wheelie Bins – Quick, not badly detailed and happy with the tonal values in it.

 

 

Once past the house, it was up the hill and through some garages and this was the second image of the series. Ok, as an image it looks almost clichéd but I liked it and another ticked off. Not too bad I thought and off to the park I thought to see what I could find there…

 

 

 

 

Before I could get to the park, the main road has to be negotiated – of which luckily for me, in some respects had the remnants of some road works – Sketch three below – which is my favourite of the five B/W works I produced. Compositionally stronger and tonally quite good too…

Sketch Four, is a more straight up and down picture of a rotting tree stump, nothing flash. Happy with it

The above sketch is the Fifth and final sketch in the series – probably the more accomplished of the five, in truth spent the most time on it. Tonally and compositionally strong and most likely to be realised as a painting even though the traffic cones is my favourite.

For the Five watercolour sketches – the route was something similar, and three of the sketches were produced when I did the B/W versions. Cheating a little bit, but quicker and more practical. So, for the first sketch I returned to the first picture of the wheelie bins. See below. I think the B/W version helped for establishing tonal values to start with enough detail to add interest without fully realising the idea. Happy with it

and onwards to more deja vu, the garages. I decided to replicate the mattress image again – 3 basic primary colours + paynes grey – it came out ok…

Just around the corner from the above, I stopped to paint the image below – garage door with traffic cones, surely a winner?

For sketch Four, I returned to the tree stump again – to see how that would work. I went a little mad, and the real life version is not that green! I prefer the B/W version in hindsight as it has more mood and character to it?

as the newsreaders say “And Finally”… is a sketch of s sign, pretty much 5-10 minutes away from all of the above sketches. I was running out of ideas and time but thought this might be good to add context and a sense of place and identity…

I enjoyed the sketching joint, and produced some reasonable images to it. The work of George Shaw definitely influenced here, in terms of environment, place and identity. there is also a nod to the pathos he has in his work coupled with a wry humour.