Castles near Bridgend - Coity and Ogmore

I so enjoyed the sketchcrawl on Saturday that on Sunday, and again on Bank Holiday Monday, I wanted to go out again. The only tiny regret I have from the sketchcrawl is that I didn't try to put watercolour washed on the craw - I could have done, because I had paints with me.

So I did a little research on relatively local attractions, and came up with the two castles. The first sketch I made of the gatehouse at Coity. It's not awful, not by any stretch of the imagination. However it wasn't quite what I was trying to do. Not quite. There's not enough of a contrast between the front of the gatehouse in the light and the side in the shade. The greenery of the mound isn't very well done either. However, there are things which I think aren't so badly done. The small tower on the extreme left of the gatehouse has a lovely colour variation between the brown walls and the moss on it. Also I think that the front of the gatehouse is more effective because I did enough line work with the bricks and stones, but not too much, and the patches of different shades complement this. If I'd extended the wall on the right, maybe it would have been more effective. I didn't try to make another one on the Sunday because I was gasping for a coffee, and my son and daughter in law live nearby.

So, yesterday, then, and a visit to Ogmore Castle. There were generally more people about that there

had been in Coity, and that was a good thing because it meant that a few family groups came up to where I was sitting at different times, to have a look and a chat about the picture. I know that not everyone enjoys this aspect of urban sketching, but I usually really enjoy it. So, the idea was to have another go, and use what I felt could have been done better with the Coity picture to make a better picture of Ogmore.
One way that I did this was to take a double page in my sketchbook. This meant that I could sketch the ruined keep of the castle large enough to be effective. I made the ink sketch first, and used quite a bit more shading than I had on the previous. However there were still a load of spaces where the light and shade was going to appear through the use of the paint. I probably used about 6 subtly different shades for the brickwork, and the patchiness for me does convey the feeling of rough, broken up brickwork.

South Wales USk group - sketchcrawl saturday 24th Aug - Rhondda Heritage Park

This Saturday - 24th August - saw the monthly South Wales Urban Sketchers Group sketchcrawl, this time to the Rhondda Heritage Park. I wasn't able to make the April, May and June sketchcrawls, and was in Alicante at the time of the July meeting. So it was really nice that I was able to make this one.

The Rhondda Heritage Park is situated in what used to be the Lewis Merthyr Colliery. I had a pretty good feeling that this was going to appeal to me even though I have never visited before, since I love industrial architecture and machinery, and I wasn't disappointed. Here are the three sketches I made during the crawl:-