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.

One Sketch #55) RAF 100 celebrations - Typhoon Eurofighter outside Cardiff City Hall

The grey bird sits
Inert but deadly
Waiting to make its way
Through hardship
To the stars.

In the South Wales Sketchers Chapter Facebook group yesterday Scott, one of the members, posted that today and tomorrow their are a number of historic RAF aircraft on display outside Cardiff City Hall, as part of the RAF centenary celebrations. Well, I am not the kind of sketcher to look a gifthorse like this in the mouth. I made several sketches, which you can see below. The only problem was that there was nowhere to sit so I had to sketch standing up, and the positions I wanted to stand in to sketch were right out in the open, so my neck is quite nastily sunburned. Never mind.

One Sketch #54) Horsey

Racing is a business first
We know that's true, of course
Forgive me if I have to ask-
What's in it for the horse?

In the last 18 months or so I've painted and sold several pictures of racehorses, so, stuck for inspiration I went back to my old faithful subject. Here's some of the paintings made in the last year or so: -

The Home Straight

Racing from Newmarket

Over the Sticks

Frankel

One Sketch #53) Gymnast

I coulda been a gymnast,
Although it may sound crazy
The only thing that stopped me
Was, I'm just too flipping lazy.

Just wanted to sketch some movement today, and I remember that a few weeks ago on BBC's Big Painting Challenge the participants had to paint a gymnast in movement, so I though - now there's an idea.

One Sketch #52) Bubble Car

I think an Isetta
Is really cool
So never mind
The ridicule

Yes, I remember seeing a few of these in London when I was a very small boy, and I've always liked them, and two other German Bubble cars, the Messerschmidt Kabineroller and the Heinkel Trojan very much. Since I sketched my other dream car, the Jaguar XK120 a week or two ago I decided to even things up a bit.

Yes, I did make this sketch on Wednesday, but it's been a busy week. For the last three days I've had to make quick sketches at lunchtime at work, and haven't had time to post them until now.