Sketching Tips 6: Watercolour or not?

Here’s a confession, good people. I’ve never been much good at using watercolour. There, I’ve come clean. I am so jealous of those people who, with a few brush strokes, can transform an ordinary black and white outline sketch into something with depth and beauty. I can’t. 

However, this doesn’t mean that I don’t try, and maybe I’m kidding myself, but I do think that I’m improving. If I show you what I think as some failures and successes, and draw what advice I can from them, then hopefully you might agree.

* What have I learned?

1) Don’t be afraid of colour

Compare this sketch which I made in 2016 : -

With this sketch of the same piece of sculpture from 2018

The later sketch is better drawn in the first place. It has a more appropriate use of detail, and the angle is far more dramatic for the viewer. But even allowing for that, the colours are so much more vibrant on the bottom sketch, while those on the top one look weak and washed out. Generally it’s better to go too bright, rather than too watery. I didn’t leave the large areas of white negative space in the bottom picture either, and this seems to have worked better for me.

2) You can use colour to unify disparate elements in a page in our sketchbook.

Now have a look at these two pages made during a solo sketch crawl: - 

                                                                                               
Now, as individual sketches I didn’t feel that there was anything drastically wrong with either page. But the sketch elements have not been linked together at all. Compare them with these two pages, made literally a couple of weeks later: -

Colour here is the linking principle between the disparate elements of this sketch made in the Waterfront Museum in Swansea. On a slightly smaller scale, this sketch from the Swansea tramshed museum works with colour in a similar way: - 

 3) It can make a huge difference the kind of paper that you use.

One of the difficulties of making these colour sketches was that I’d been using my sketchbook to do so, and while it’s great for ink sketching, it makes it harder to use watercolours than it should be, since the paper tends to resist, meaning that you don’t get anything like an even spread of paint off the brush. So if you are considering trying to add watercolour to an ink sketch, you might do well to make your sketch on watercolour paper. For example, compare: -

This is a sketch from Gower Heritage centre made in my sketchbook. Compositionally I think it’s great, but apart from a few areas it still looks washed out. I had the devil’s own job painting in the cockerel’s brown feathers, for example. Since struggling with this I’ve always tried to use more appropriate paper if I have any intention of adding colour to a sketch. 

4) You can get better results using minimal ink lines, and using different tones to create shading. 

Now this: -

-is a sketch that I made in Kaunas, Lithuania, and it’s one of very few sketches where I think that I was close to achieving what I was trying to do with line and wash. I think that this can be ascribed to the fact that I knew that I wanted to make this a line and wash picture, so I consciously cut down the amount of detail that I put in with the pen. I left the shading for the paint.