Cancelled Sketchcrawl

Yes, it's a shame, but South Wales along with many other parts of the UK was hit by unseasonal blizzards last week, and so the transport situation to Cardiff yesterday was still rather dodgy. So the South Wales Urban Sketchers chapter cancelled our scheduled monthly sketchcrawl in the Cornerstone café. It's a shame, but it's one of those things, and definitely the most sensible decision under the circumstances.

Still, it wasn't too difficult to get into Swansea, and I made this sketch of one of my favourite derelict buildings - the Palace Theatre. This is actually a listed building - it's one of very few original music halls left in the UK.

I've been urban sketching since August 2016, although I've always sketched, and while you can always improve, I'm not that unhappy with my line drawing with an ink pen. However, I've always struggled with colour. It's probably fair to say that water colour has not been my medium in the past. Still, I'm very aware that adding watercolour washes can really enhance a sketch, so I have been trying to improve by metaphorically puling myself up by my own bootlaces.

In particular I went back to Marc Taro Holmes' book "The Urban Sketcher"and I tried to use his -tea - milk - honey method of applying successive washes to this sketch. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly a step along the way to where I'd like to be with it. If you compare it with a sketch I made of Kidwelly Castle less than a year ago, you can see what I mean: -

I made it with the same small travel set of watercolours, but it looks pale and washed out, even though I did try to paint in some of the detail on the stonework. If anything it seems to shrink back into the page, while yesterday's sketch seems to come forward out of the page. I do admit that the picture above is a scan. Mind you, my scanner for some reason does struggle to pick out blues. That's why the sky looks so patchy.

The sketchcrawl at the Cornerstone Café has been rescheduled for next Saturday. Watch this space.