Using Your Sketches In A Simple Calendar

So, you've all of these wonderful sketches you've made. What do you do with them now once you've scanned or photographed them and posted them online? Well, one thing you might like to do is to make your own calendar. It's really quite simple to make a basic calendar using Word. If you don't think your computer skills are up to it, don't worry, it's simple, and I've put together a little tutorial video to show you how it's done. Because I can't post videos of much more than a minute, this is actually in 3 parts.

State Capitol Building - Nebraska USA

Today's prompt on Sketching Every Day was Capitol buildings. Well, there are a lot of American members of the group - nothing wrong with that either. So I spent half an hour or so this morning looking at photos of the various capitol buildings o each state. The vast majority of them are very reminiscent of THE Capitol Building in Washington DC. I decided to go for something a bit different. This is the capitol building of the state of Nebraska. I like it, even though, judging by some of the lists that it features on it certainly isn't everybody else's cup of tea. This particular 1920s/30s idiom is one I'm quite familiar with. Swansea's Gwyn Hall and Magistrate's Court are quite reminiscent, and the Great West Road and Western Avenue of my home town of suburban West London had several buildings in this particular 'Metroland' style.

At last - an ink sketch

Yes, having finished my painting project yesterday, and taken care of today's big chore, getting the car MOT tested, I went back to my old faithful ink pens, and my old faithful Sketching Every Day Facebook group. Today's prompt was firefighters, fire stations and fire hydrants. Immediately this brought to me the recent Notre Dame fire, which inspired the following sketch: - 

- And relax . . .

Yes, the plough horse painting is finished. Here it is:-

Well happy.

Plough Horse update

Here's where I am now: -

Very pleased with the way this one is coming. This is 4 days' work, probably with an average of 4 hours work each of those days.

Plough Horses Project

In my last post I mentioned the plough horse painting. I spent maybe 3 more hours on it yesterday. This is where I stopped on Saturday, the day I started sketching it onto the canvas board:-

Considering how long it took me to make the harness racing painting, this was quite an achievement for one day's work.

Here's where the painting is at the moment: -

I did a fair bit more work on the background before starting on the first horse. You can see the sparse foliage to the left has been painted in. I've also darkened some of the areas of bare soil. The most obvious difference though is the work I've done on the horse on the left. I'm delighted with the head, but not yet finished with the lower legs - that blue grey is just the base and will be painted over during the next session which, all things being equal, should be today.

Racehorse pencil sketch

Been a while since I made a graphite sketch. I was taking a break from the plough horse painting and it struck me that I've made several larger acrylic paintings of horses, and one ink sketch during the challenge, but I've never done one in pencil. So I got my cheap small sketchbook, and an ordinary HB pencil and I made this sketch :-

New Project: Plough Horses

Yes, I've embarked upon another acrylic painting. Look, I only really have time to work on these during school holidays, so don't blame me too much for this. I'll soon be back in work and won't have time to do much other than ink sketches.

I enjoyed the last painting so much I decided to go horsey again, another 16x20 canvas board, but this time a pair of mighty plough horses. Here's the basic sketch onto canvas:-

Sketchbook Revival Is Back

If you've never tried out sketchbook revival you can do a lot worse than giving it a go. I did it last year, and enjoyed and found a lot of it very useful, and I'm signed up again for this year. If you want to learn more, then follow the link, and sign up. It's free, people!

Sketchbook Revival

Harness Racing Painting - finished

Sorry it's been a while. I've been without the internet for a week, so I just haven't been able to post. Still, it has at least allowed me to concentrate on finishing my latest acrylic. We left the painting here last time:-

You might recall that I was trying to do this painting 'properly' - that is, to not start painting in the horses until I'd finished the background . By this stage I'd go a nice effect with the trees, and found a green I could live with for the turf. So the next stage was to complete the horse in the foreground:-

I shan't lie to you, I do like painting horses very much. At first I wasn't sure that the colour combinations were quite right for this horse. but a combination of burnt ochre and burnt umber were actually pretty good. A little phalo blue added to my darkest raw umber gave me just what I was looking for for the shadows between the horse's forelegs. 

I do think that the horse which has been pretty much fully painted in by this photo is the most successful part of the whole painting. I used a similar combination of ochre and umber for the horse on the far right, although I went lighter just to distinguish it a little from the main horse. 

The horse to the immediate right of the main horse is a darker horse, and I'd started painting in one leg by this time, just to start to get an idea of the way that the different shades might interact with each other. However I did decide that I should probably paint in the jockey, the trap, and the horse and jockey on the extreme left before I concentrated on this horse.

The jockey is rather nicely painted, and he would come to stand out more once I painted in the darker horse behind him. The horse behind was darker anyway, and I thought that I would try to emphasise this. Looking at the next photograph I'm not entirely sure that this was the right way to go. Or rather, it is for the jockey in the foreground as it's very much brought out his head and upper body, but the horse behind is a but of a formless blob. Looking to the right you can see that I've applied a very watery base layer of a mixture of a little mars black, a little pthalo blue, a little china white and a lot of water.  

By the time I'd got this far the left hand side of the painting was pretty much completed. I'd done a little more work on the remaining horse, darkening some of the shadows on the rear leg. The idea when I was going to paint in the rest of the horse was to make it a mixture of blue-black, and dark browns as well. That was the idea, anyway.

Working left to right, I painted in the jockey and trap to the immediate right of the main horse. The dark horse to the right was going to prove to be a problem for me. Partly this was because of problems with the initial sketch. As I worked my way up the horse, applying paint to the head and neck, I came to realise that the head and neck were not proportioned correctly, so a lot of what I did before the next photograph was trying to correct this as best I could.

- and that's the finished painting. I did some more work trying to finesse the horse on the extreme right and extreme left, but that was it.

Doing your own 365 One Sketch A Day Challenge - a few tips

It’s not impossible that you may be thinking about embarking on our own 365 day one sketch a day challenge. If you are, then here’s my advice and tips, based on my own. 

·       Set out your round rules before you start. Obviously the big one is that you have to make at least one completed sketch every consecutive day of the year. But then there are other things to be considered. Does it have to be in a particular medium? Does it have to be from life or can you use a photographic reference? For me I allowed as broad an interpretation as possible, probably as a recognition that the challenge is hard enough as it is without narrowing the terms of your challenge.

·       Decide whether you are going to post your pictures online. Obviously I’m going to say that I think this is a good idea because I did it. But there may come times when you’ll need all the help you can get with motivation to complete your challenge, and having the need to post something online can help with this.

·       Think seriously about what you’re going to do on those days when you either can’t find the motivation, or the time to make the kind of sketch you’d like to make. As the great John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” You might want to make sure that you always carry an emergency pen/pencil and piece of paper with you in case you’re stuck somewhere on business or whatever. Several of my sketches were made with a work biro on whatever scrap of paper I could find. On days such as this you have to get in the habit of actively looking for that ten minute window when you can make a sketch.

You might also want to think about what the simplest and quickest sketch you could make if all else fails would be like. I always told myself that if I had to I would allow myself to make a stick man sketch one day (only 1 day mind you). Thankfully I never had to, but if it had made the difference between keeping up the challenge, and failing on one day I would have done it.

One thing I didn’t do which might actually be helpful to you is to compile some prompts – maybe a couple of dozen, for you to use on days when inspiration fails.

·       Seriously consider joining a sketching group on Facebook. Sketching Every Day, which I joined in late July, provided me with a daily prompt (which I didn’t always follow, but was a great source of inspiration for sketches), another forum for displaying the sketches, and a source of encouragement and support.

·       There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about sticking with what you know and what you’re comfortable with. However you might like to think about using your challenge as an opportunity to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and try media that you’re not comfortable with, or which are totally new to you. I love using an ink sketching pen, and I think that it’s the medium I work best in. However I also produced sketches during the challenge using graphite pencil, biro, direct watercolour, acrylic, watercolour pencils and coloured pencils.

·       Keep an eye out for opportunities to tie your challenge into other challenges. The 30 day direct watercolour challenge took care of the month of June, for example, and Inktober took care of all bar a couple of days of October.

·       A year is a daunting amount of time. So although your overall goal is reach a year, do it by setting yourself medium term, and even short term targets. Start off by seeing if you can manage 7 days, just one week. When you’ve completed that, then set a new target of a fortnight. Then stretch it to a month. Once you’ve done a whole month, then you’re already 1/12 of the way there. Once you get to 37 days you’ve completed more than a tenth. Keep breaking it down into short achievable targets and you’ll hopefully find this helps you stay focused.

·       Don’t throw away the sketches you make. You might not love all of them, but each one represents a step on your journey and has its own value for that if for nothing else.

Acrylic Painting Project - Harness Racing

If you've read my previous two posts then you'll know that almost a fortnight ago I finished my last sketch to complete the one sketch a day challenge. One effect of this was that it has freed up my Wednesday evenings at art group. For the last few months I've been concentrating on making either plain ink or ink and watercolour sketches which I could complete in an evening to take care of that day's sketch. Now that I've done it, I decided that it was high time to start another acrylic painting.

What to paint, though? Well, thinking back over the last couple of years, when it comes to large acrylic paintings, my favourite subjects have been trams, trolleys and streetcars; steam locomotives and racehorses and working horses. Well, my last painting was a tram, and the one before that a steam engine. So it looked like another horse racing painting would fit the bill. This time, though, I decided to do something slightly different, by panting a harness racing subject.

Starting this one I promised myself that I was going to work patiently, by which I meant that I was going to sketch the design first onto the canvas, and not put one speck of paint down before this was finished. Then I was going to paint in the backgrounds, and then and only then was I going to allow myself to paint the bits I actually really enjoy - the horses and the jockeys.

So I spent all of Wednesday 27th's Artist's Group session in just sketching the design, and even then worked on it for another half hour last Saturday.

Taking so much time, the ironic thing is that if this was just a pencil sketch or an ink sketch of the same size I would have put a lot more detail and shading into it. The canvas is too big to be scanned, ad pencil on my canvases just doesn't photograph all that clearly, still hopefully it should give you the gist of what I've been doing.

Last Saturday, then, having completed the sketch I put down a layer of fairly strong yellow for the turf. This was always going to be painted over, but I was hoping that glimpses of the underlying yellow would come through in some areas. Then with the trees in the background I began applying dabs of light green , some of a slightly more watery consistency than the others. The idea was to paint in shadows and other colours of the leaves on top of this for the trees.

In this photo you can see the basic mottled effect in the top middle, while I've begun to paint in shadows and more variegation on the left hand side. I'd also begun to apply a mixture of olive green and titanium white on top of the yellow on the turf.

The above photo represents between 5 and 6 hours of work. I put in another hour's work before Wednesday completing the green layer on the turf. On the Wednesday I finished the trees in the background, and I wasn't at all unhappy with the effect. A judicious application of pthalo blue in some of the shadows and a watery application of burnt sienna in one area created the look I wanted, and drew some appreciative comments from other artists there. However, the other side of the coin was that my attempt to rectify the turf by adding a thin layer of creamy yellow to the top just made it far, far worse.

So on Thursday evening, I put in another hour and a half's work, applying layers of two slightly different lighter greens, one of which has a very appealing emerald tint. After about half an hour I started to think that this might actually work, and after another hour this morning I was a lot happier.

This one shows you the trees in the background now, and gives you a good idea about the different shades of green in the turf. I put in a bit more work on the turf, applying some subtle shadows and some scuff marks, and then, wonder of wonders, at least 10 hours after I began working on it, I finally started to paint a horse.

This is where I am currently. The neck and head of the horse in the foreground, which are mostly combined different shades of burnt umber and yellow ochre, which I've started painting still need some work, but it's a joy to do. I don't know if I'll get time to do anything more before Wednesday, but I'll post an update when I can.

Sunday 31st March - Sketch Crawl South Wales USK group - Llandaff Cathedral

My 365 day One Sketch A Day Challenge

I completed the one sketch a day challenge last Monday, 25^th March 2019, with the little doodle of Morocco Mole. I was tempted to post it straight away, and then launch into some reflections on my year of sketches. In hindsight I’m glad that I’ve waited well over a week to try to put my thoughts on this into some sort of order. In no particular order , here they are:-

It was easier than I ever expected, and harder than I ever expected. Alright, I’ll try to explain that. It was easier than I expected as I had thought that there would come a time when, however much I wanted to produce a sketch, there just would not be any opportunity during the day. That turned out to be nonsense. I could always find time. There was never a day when I could say that I had not found even ten minutes I could steal to make a quick stick man sketch, for example. In fact I never resorted once to such underhand tactics which would fulfil the letter of the challenge, but certainly not the spirit.

No, how I found it harder than expected was that I never expected to lose my oomph, my motivation for the challenge, which I did in September, around about the time I was approaching the six month mark. While I never came that close to deliberately chucking it in, I did come close on more than one occasion to ‘accidentally’ neglecting to make that day’s sketch. I think it helped that I had the blog to post my sketches on. I admitted to myself when I started that there would come days when I couldn’t post a sketch on the same day that I made it, but as long as I posted it when I could and marked clearly which day it had been made, that would be okay.

Now, I’ve never had anyone comment on the blog, and for all I know nobody else has ever looked at any of these posts, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact that I would be advertising my failure to the whole world potentially helped me make sure that the imagined failure didn’t become a reality.

This was never part of my sketchy rules for the challenge, but I did originally envisage these sketches as being something of a chronicle of my year. This is why for the early sketches you see mundane subjects like my Surface Pro charger, my school shoes, my cat etc rubbing shoulders with a sketch from a day out in Gower heritage centre. That tended to go by the by, though after a while. On April 16^th my friend who ran a wedding stationery business asked me to sketch a beautiful ruined abbey in France which was hosting a client’s wedding, and so that painstaking piece of work became my sketch for the day. After that all sorts of subjects started creeping in, like a Komodo dragon, and a London Underground train from the District Line in the 1970s – things which being realistic I was going to need to use some photographic references for.

My search for inspiration along the way was helped by several things. Along the way I undertook a couple of challenges within a challenge. In the month of June I undertook the 30x30 Direct Watercolour Challenge, which meant making at least 30 sketches during the month of June, where I painted the design directly onto the paper, with no sketching in pencil or any other medium beforehand. This had the effect of focussing the mind on a) what I’d like to paint, and b) what I could paint. When it comes to sketching with an ink pen I arrogantly assume that I’m capable of sketching anything that I can see, but it’s not so with paint. Then, just as I was starting to come out of my 6 month malaise, Inktober came along. Inktober helpfully gives you a prompt for each day, although I had to ignore these on the last couple of days of the month since I was sketching in Amsterdam.Speaking of which, I made sketches a day in no fewer than 5 countries during the year – UK of course, Lithuania, Spain, Netherlands and Sweden. These trips were a godsend, and in all honesty the only problem they gave you was which sketch to use as the sketch of the day. I also helped myself back in my September malaise by setting myself the target of producing a range of sketches based on the UK’s tram systems and light rail and metro systems, for a calendar for myself.

Then, in November, I decided to sketch Christmas cards for my work colleagues as I’d done in 2017, and producing these took me nicely through November into December. The biggest help of all, though, was finding the Facebook group Sketching Every Day. Now, just from the name of the group you can see how well that ties in with my challenge. The group provides you with prompts every day of the month. Of course you don’t have to follow the prompt, but when you’re short of ideas or inspiration they’re an absolute godsend. Each month is a range of suggestions, photo prompts, featured artists, and unusual challenges like continuous line drawings for example. I joined in August, and no fewer than 124 of these sketches were direct or indirect responses to the prompts on the group page.

What effect has it had on my sketches/ my pictures/ my abilities? Good question, and not an easy one for me to answer. Dismiss this as smugness sand arrogance if you wish, but with an ink sketching pen in my hand I always feel confident I can produce a decent rendition of my subject, but then I always felt that before I embarked on the challenge anyway. I find that I can sketch some subjects more quickly than I used to be able to sketch, but now actually take a great deal longer to produce others. I have produced some far better ink and wash pictures than I’ve ever managed before, and that’s something which made the challenge worth doing if for no other reason. It’s probably easier for me to say what I’ve got out of the challenge. I would be lying if I said that I don’t have a huge feeling of satisfaction having completed it. During the challenge I have stretched myself and gone beyond my comfort zone, and produced a few fully fledged pictures that I’m actually pretty proud of. So now I will actually tell you which ones I think are good. 

My favourite sketches and pictures from my one sketch a day challenge, in chronological order: -

28/3 – Hero the Cat

2/4 – Mortal Coil

5/4/18 – Newport Chartist Commemorative sculpture

13/4/18 – Laisves Aleja

29/4/18 – AEC Regent Bus

30/4/18 – Crocodile

14/5/18 – Ant

21/5/18 – Northfields Odeon

8/6/18 – Tom Baker – the 4^th Doctor

12/6/18 – Landseer Lion

13/6/18 – Triceratops skeleton

14/6/18 – Mumbles tram

18/6/18 – Sailing Ship

30/6/18 – B Type Bus

1/7/18 – Here’s Johnny

3/7/18 – Laurel and Hardy in blue

29/7/18 – Jimi Hendrix

23/8/18 – Construction worker on Empire State Building

15/9/18 – Manchester Tram

20 – 27/9/18 – A series of modern trams and metros

1/10/18 – Scorpion “Poisonous” (inktober)

2/10/18 – Sleeping Puppy (tranquil – inktober)

4/10/18 – Saruman (spell – Inktober)

7/10/18 – Sleeping Lioness (exhausted inktober)

19/10/18 – Doctor Who monster – (scorched – inktober)

21/10/18 – Old Waterloo and City line train  (drain – inktober)

26/10/18 – Brooklyn Bridge (stretch – inktober)

31/10/18 – Amsterdam canal bridge

9/11/18 – Indian Elephant

12/11/18 – Old London tram

2/12/18 – The Little Tramp

8/12/18 – Pet Jabberwocky

28/12/18 – Swansea Marina

31/12/18 – Porthcawl

4/1/19 – Eltz Castle

10/1/19 – Tower Bridge

11/1/19 Budapest Tram

14/1/19 – Amsterdam Tram

19/1/19 – Murcia Cathedra;

22/1/19 – Rhinoceros

25/1/19 – Tintern Abbey

26/1/19 – York Minster

4/2/19 – Iron Bridge

17/2/19 – Alphonse Mucha

18/2/19 – Clement Attlee

20/2/19  - Fleet Street in the 30s

26/2/19 – The Vasa

3/3/19 – Marine Iguana

19/3/19 – Howling Wolf 

Hmm – 56/365 – doesn’t seem like a huge number, does it? Well, I’m not saying that I think that the rest of them are all rubbish. In the interests of fairness, I shall list what I consider to be the worst sketches now:- 

6/4/18 – In the barbers

20/4/18 – Seagulls

26/4/18 – Three Witches

7/5/18 – Cardiff Pierhead Building

19/5/18 – Horsey

5/6/18 – Meridian Tower Swansea Bay

5/7/18 – Little Owl

11/7/18 – George Michael

17/7/18 – Geoffrey Chaucer

28/7/18 – Ferris Wheel

9/9/18 – Booth’s Hay on Wye

3/10/18 – Inktober roasting

13/10/18 – Inktober Guarded

17/10/18 – Telosian from Star Trek (inktober – swollen)

5/11/18 – Guy Fawkes

7/11/18 – Pineapple

30/11/18 – Macau Skyline

1/1/19 – Fernando Botero

3/1/19 – The Secret Life of Butterflies Zine

29/1/19 – Carry Akroyd

6/2/18 – Bucket List Destination

10/2/19 – Umbrellas

Well, it’s a relief that I only think 22 of them are bad enough to make this list. Of these 22, 11 are either made with biro or with watercolour. If the glass is half full, I’ll say that this shows how successful my ink sketches were – the vast majority of the 365 were pure ink sketches. If the glass is half empty I’ll say that it shows how weak my work with watercolour and biro is.

One Sketch 365) (Monday 25th March) Morocco Mole - ONE YEAR - CHALLENGE SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED

Morocco's a short sighted mole
Who'll rarely be found in a hole
I'm really quite sorry
He's like Peter Lorre
A rather ridiculous soul.

You'll have to take my word for it that I actually did make this sketch a week ago on Monday - but I promise you that I did. So why haven't I posted it? Well, because of inertia really. Rather than feeling as if a weight had been lifted from me on completing my one sketch challenge, suddenly not having it to do any more saw me filled with lethargy. It wasn't a question of how long would I keep going once the year was up. In fact I didn't make another sketch for 6 days, until the Llandaff sketch crawl with the sketchers group.

I've got my thoughts together now, and I will post them shortly.