One Sketch 309) (Monday 28th) Carry Akroyd

The fox is always near
Lurking in the long grass, tall grass
Short grass
The fox is always near.
So the hare listens
To the song of the wind
And the song of the scent
For the fox is always near
Yet the hare
Fills his lungs and his heart
And his tune fills the long grass,
Tall grass, short grass
For he has jumped over the moon
And the fox was nowhere near.

Sorry, don't know what that was all about. Yesterday's prompt from Sketching Every Day  was the artist Carry Akroyd. I really liked the original of this, which has the quality of a wood cut. Muggins here did it with ink pen on white paper. Would have been a lot easier to use some kind of white medium on black paper. D'oh.

One Sketch 284) The Secret Life of Butterflies Zine

The Secret Life of Butterflies

Each is a MASTER of disguise

each is a Ninja Glider

and loves to drink rough CIDER

They love to go to Discos

and fly to San Francisco

They knock on People's doors

- and when they sleep, they SNORES!

Basically, if you fold a piece of paper into 8, and cut it in the right place, you get a wee booklet of 8 pages which we can call a zine - from magazine, I'm guessing. I didn't come up with the idea. The nonsense rhyme on it, and the pictures, now, they're mine. I've loved butterflies since my youngest children were very little - about 20 years now - and so this was what occurred to me. The butterfly in the pages is based on the Peacock (Inachis Io) which is my favourite species.

One Sketch 279) (Saturday 29th December) St. Mungo's Cathedral Glasgow

An oasis of calm and peace
In a city
of
energy

I hope that you can see the influence of Ian Fennelly in this one. I'm not sure that I really like the façade in this one. If you look at Ian Fennelly's work you'll see that although he is playing with form, he does still manage to keep elements of his buildings in proportion with each other, whereas the façade in this just isn't. Live and learn - it's all part of the learning curve. Not totally unhappy with the colours though, although it might have been more effective just to have the colours bleeding and washing out towards the bottom of the façade.

One Sketch 249) Don Blanding

I never wish
For narrow fish
I'm a man who has to say
I'd much prefer a manta ray.

Now that I've completed my self imposed mission to create Christmas cards, I followed today's prompt on Facebook's Sketching Every Day group. This is a copy of a design by American artist Don Blanding. I didn't know his work before, but some of his work I've now seen has this wonderful graphic quality which just lights my candle.

One Sketch 228 (Thursday 8th October) Henri Rousseau tiger

Tyger , Tyger,
Burning bright
Don't look now
Your tail's alight.
(with thanks to Spike Milligan)

A Sketching Every Day prompt again. We were set the challenge of doing something inspired by or connected with Henri Rousseau, le douanier. Well, I was tempted to do something with The Lion and The Gypsy ( or vice versa) - you'll know the one, it must be his most well known work. Instead I plumped for this tiger. Still, we had inspectors in work all week, so I didn't have time of an evening to do a sketch AND paint it AND post it. Which is why I'm only getting round to posting these today. You'll have to take my word for it that they were made on the days that I said they were ( but they were.)

One Sketch 227 (Weds 7th October) Pineapple

We all have our favourites
Pineapple is mine
Just so long as it's
More apple than pine

Yes, dearly beloved, we were set the prompt on Sketching Every Day on Facebook to draw a fruit, and so I plumped for my favourite fruit, the pineapple. I'd forgotten how much I love pineapple, so on Thursday I took some slices into work to have with my lunch. Absolute heaven.

One Sketch #147) Sunday 19th August - San Isidro after Matuesz Urbanowicz

This is not a jokio
When I tell you folkio
That downtown San Isidro
Just doesn't look like Tokyo

I think that I've mentioned the Facebook group Sketching Every Day before now. Well, their prompt for this particular Sunday was to make a sketch in the style of artist and illustrator Mateusz Urbanowicz. He's an artist and illustrator who works and lives in Tokyo, and I really like his work. However, I was staying in San Isidro when I made this sketch, and however you look at it, San Isidro is never going to look like Tokyo. So I said the Japanese characters which - I think - say San Isidro and my name.

One Sketch #128) Hay Cart

Time accelerates.
Years ago it moved
No faster then the hooves
Of a horse
Tethered to a farmer's cart.

Yes, another prompt from the Sketching Every Day group on Facebook. Looks appealing, doesn't it. And that from me, who think of myself as a confirmed city boy. I like the effect of the blue grey shadows beneath the cart.

Sketching Tips 7) Sketching foliage

Foliage

It’s been a while since I last gave a ‘lesson’ and so please let me start with a reminder of my usual caveat. I’m totally self taught, and all I can tell you is about my way of doing things. I’m not recommending it as the right way or the best way, just explaining that this is how I do it, in the hope that this might help. 

Now, most of the time foliage – by which I mean trees, bushes and grasses – is definitely not the ‘star’ of my sketch. I’m not deiberately dissing foliage here, but I’m a city boy originally, and what I find excites me is achitecture, machinery and people. So I tend to keep to limit the foliage to outlines with a few light shading marks. This usually provides a nice contrast with the actual object of the sketch. For example, in the sketch of a bridge in Aberavon below, the lightly sketched grass and the sky together frame the bridge, which is the real ‘star’ of the picture. A few vertical or almost vertical strokes do a good job of conveying the suggestion of grass to the eye.

In a similar way, in the sketch below which shows Pontrhydyfen Aqueduct, the darkness of the stone contrasts with the outlines of the forestry, which have not been shaded at all. To keep it light, I sketched in a few areas of shadow, but merely left them as outlines, which is a technique that I find can work particularly well when you’re trying to sketch in trees and bushes.

A couple more examples of me using this technique are these two sketches:-

The British Lion Pub Cwmavon. In this sketch I’ve even included outlines of some of the larger leaves, but again, none of the foliage is actually shaded, because the building is the focus, not the trees.

I like this sketch below, of Dyffryn Rhondda Post Office in the Afan Valley, because there is a contrast between the trees on the right, and the grassy hill side on the top left of the sketch.

Now, this minimalist technique for sketching foliage is fine when you are making a building, or something else the focal point of the sketch. However there may be times when you want to sketch the foliage itself in more detail.

This is a sketch of the disused Cynonville Railway Station. The track was ripped up decades ago, and the station now is on the route of a cycle path from Afan Argoed Country Park. Its leafy, overgrown appearance is very much the point of what I wanted to show about it.

As with the bridge picture, I’ve used vertical, or near vertical lines to show grass. However, as you can see I’ve applied far more shading to the bushes. If I was really focusing on the hut, then I’d just have only drawn the outlines of the shaded patches, and not all of them either for that matter. With this amount of shading you just can help but be struck by how overgrown the place is, and the hut itself seems to be merging into the foliage, which is very much the idea that I wanted to convey – that the trees and grasses are slowly reclaiming the land.  

Then there’s this sketch I made of my own back yard:-

If you look at it closely, you can see that it’s actually an inversion of the way that I usually depict foliage in a sketch. The buildings are lightly shaded, where shaded at all, while there’s heavy shading on the bush, and many of the individual leaves are sketched and even some of their marking details are sketched in. And the reason is that when I made the sketch, I felt that the bush was as much the ‘star’ of the picture as any other element.

A few random points

If foliage is not the most important element of the sketch:-

·       The more shading of the foliage that you do, the more you will draw attention towards the foliage and away from the main elements of the sketch, which isn’t what you want to do.

·       You can get good effects by simply sketching in the outlines of blocks of foliage, and also the outlines of areas of shading.

·       A few vertical, or near vertical lines sketched close together can give the appearance of grassy areas.

If foliage is one of the most important elements of the sketch:-

·       Sketch in areas of shading. As with many things, the more different gradations of shading you use to suggest lighter and darker areas, the more detailed your foliage will appear.

·       Heavy shading tends to make foliage appear denser, bushier and more overgrown if this is the effect that you want to achieve.

·       You can achieve some very appealing effects by using areas of dark shading around negative space in the shape of individual leaves, especially if the background to the tree or bush itself is lightly sketched in.