#30x30DrectWatercolor2019 paintings 4-9

Here we are then: -

4) Horse racing - They're Off. I painted this at Artists' group on Wednesday. Sadly we've gone down to once a fortnight, but at least you can do a decent watercolor like this in about 90 minutes, unlike my acrylic 15 hour marathons. Not a fan of horse racing at all, if I'm totally honest with you, but I just love painting horse racing scenes, be it in acrylic or watercolor.

5) Port Talbot Docks. The scan has not picked out all of the colors, since I went very watery with this. Hence the ship looking as if it has a half white hull - the white part is actually a light rust red which for some reason just has not been picked up.

6) Rafael Nadal. This was inspired by the continuing French Open tennis, when earlier this week Rafa rolled back the years and easily dismissed Roger Federer.

7) Colin Baker as the 6th Doctor. Saturday 8th June was Colin Baker's birthday. I always felt that Colin got a very rough deal as the Doctor. Put simply, most of the scripts he was given weren't really good enough, and there's precious little that any actor can do about that.

8) D-Day Landing. Last week was the 75th anniversary of D Day. I was fortunate enough o accompany a party of school children to Normandy in 1994, which was the 50th anniversary of D Day.

9) Statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. I'm pretty pleased with this. Last year I loved the painting I made of one of Landseer's bronze lions in Trafalgar Square, so this year I decided I'd do another iconic London statue.

What's Happening? Well . . .

Sorry. After the one sketch a day for a whole year challenge I've been sitting back on my laurels for a bit. Not that I haven't been doing anything at all. I've done a few sketches - I made a trip to Cardiff sketching a week or two ago, for instance. I've also made the odd sketch for Sketching Every Day - here's a couple of them: -

The second one was a challenge to make a self portrait based on the style of a favourite artist - being a natural show off I did 4. I pasted that self portrait sketch I made in March 4 times onto the same Word page, printed it off and sketched the additions over the top.

Since I finished my plough horses painting, though, I have made another couple of paintings in acrylic. First there was this one:-

basically my wife said, these horse paintings you've been doing are all well and good, but couldn't you do an old railway poster for me? We looked on Google images and she gave me a shortlist of three. This was my favourite, and it must have taken about 15 hours to make.

Then a little over a fortnight ago I started painting another 16x 20 in canvas in Artists Group and in my spare time. I was so taken with the plough horses painting which I made over Easter that I wanted to see if I could do a totally different large animal. They don't come much larger than an elephant, so this is what I decided to do. Here's the finished painting:-

I didn't keep a stop watch on it, but again, I'd reckon that this was about 15 hours from first putting pencil to canvas to signing my name.

Coming up though, from tomorrow it's June, and the 30x30 direct watercolour challenge for 2019 begins. I'm not committing myself in the same way that I did last year, but I'm certainly going to start it and see how far I can go with it. Watch this space.

- And relax . . .

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

Well happy.

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.

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.

One Sketch 359 (Tuesday 19th March) Wolf

Don't expect me
To domesticate
Any time soon
Keep your pampered pooches
While I howl
At the moon.

No idea what prompted this, but suddenly had a feeling that I wanted to sketch a wolf howling, so here it is.

One Sketch 333) Hippo

Whenever I've been with a hippo
He's never afraid to let rippo
Each gigantic fart
Is only the start
-Be wary of giving him lippo.

That's terrible. Why a hippo today? No idea, other than some days you just know are going to turn out to be hippo days - no point resisting it.

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 303) Rhinoceros

It is a beast
I have to say
Of quite exalted rank
It has my admiration
Half animal,
Half tank.

No idea what else to sketch today, so decided on this rhino - shall we call him Neil. Badoom boom ching - I'm here all week, ladies and gents.

One Sketch 247) Reindeer (sort of) Christmas Card

Ho ho ho
But watch your back
And don't go near
The guy with the sack

This is my 25th Christmas card this year, so we're definitely getting there. One more, and I reach the target I set myself for November, and should have enough. Mind you, I'm giving the first of them tomorrow night at Artists Group, since its our last meeting until January.

One Sketch 240) Reindeer Christmas Card

Prancer, Dancer
Dasher, Vixen
Comet, Cupid
Donner, Blitzen
Call them what you like
They're knackered by Boxing Day.

You gotta have a reindeer card amongst them.

One Sketch 235) Baby Pug (Thursday 15th November)

Ladies and gents

I give you

A living oxymoron

- Ugly but cute.

Just a matter of personal opinion, of course. I didn't have a lot of time, and so dashed this off fairly quickly. 

One Sketch 229 (Friday 9th November) Indian Elephant

An elephant
It must be said
Is better off living than dead
So leave them alone
When tusks they have grown
Pull out your own teeth instead.

Yes, another prompt from Sketching Every Day - don't worry, nearly caught up now. This was just India, and since eephants are amongst my most favouritist creatures in the whole world, and Indian elephant seemed the obvious choice. You know me by now, I try not to miss an obvious choice.

One Sketch 211) Monday 22nd - #inktober2018 prompt 22 - Expensive

This mastiff's a dog from Tibet
That's very expensive to get
One million quid
Would be too low a bit
Value for money? Nyet.

The Tibetan Mastiff is, according to Google, the world's most expensive species of dog. It's a huge thing, and looks half lion, half dog to me.

One Sketch #161) (Saturday 1st September) Cardiff Museum Dinosaur and Cardiff Castle Animal Wall

When looking at dinosaur bones

Remember, they're more than just stones

They've teeth and they've claws

And those powerful jaws

I'm warning you, don't go alone.

Yes, urban sketching in Cardiff again. The top picture is a composite sketch featuring some of the animals on the stone Animal Wall outside the façade of Cardiff Castle. It's a 19th century creation of William Burgess - as are large parts of the castle itself. I just love it.  

When I was a kid I was a little obsessed with dinosaurs, I still try not to ass up the opportunity to have a good look at one. This is a partial sketch of a complete skeleton in the National Museum in Cardiff. To my chagrin I couldn't find a sign to identify the exact species. 

Sketching Tips 9) Sketching Living Creatures

Sketching any member of the animal kingdom is tricky. That includes human beings. The very thing that makes living creatures so interesting - their life and energy – is exactly the same thing that makes them so difficult to sketch. Living creatures often move. This creates huge problems for the urban sketcher, and as with human figures, it does necessitate finding a method which works for you.

Here’s some things for you to consider doing:-

* Cheating

OK, I say that tongue in cheek. Basically, by this I mean using a photo. Now, as well should all know by now, if you sketch from a photo, however nice it may turn out to be , it isn’t an urban sketch. I want to stress this now. In my opinion, if you possibly can sketch something from life, then you should. Intrinsically a sketch made this way has far more value than a sketch of a photograph, which is at least a stage further back removed from life. However, sometimes you are just not going to have the opportunity to sketch a particular creature from life, and I freely admit that sketches such as these next few were made from photographs:-

The attraction of sketching from a photo is obvious. The animals have been caught by the camera in a particular stance, and they aren’t going to move from that stance. I’m unlikely to encounter most of them without going to zoos or in the case of the Komodo Dragon, taking what would probably the most expensive sketching expedition of my life. 

* Sketching stuffed animals

Is this cheating? Not as long as you’re clear when you’re writing down what it is that you’ve sketched. Now, personally I’m not a great fan of taxidermy. But I have to say that it enabled me to make this sketch of a coelacanth (ironically a ‘living fossil’) in the Zoological Museum in Kaunas in Lithuania. 

Due to the conditions required to keep a coelacanth alive, it’s highly unlikely I’m ever going to see one living, so I don’t feel too guilty about sketching this one. 

* Sketching creatures that don’t move around a lot.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to my cat, Hero. 

Yes, Hero is a gorgeous looking long haired black and white cat. He can sit in the same position for hours . . . until you try to sketch him. So even with a rarely moving creature like Hero, I find I have to use a technique to capture him. The thing that a creature like Hero is most likely to move is his head. So that’s where I would start. Eyes first. Then outlines of nose, mouth and shape of the head. No shading at this stage – once the outlines are in, then you can capture the shading gradually. In the space of 10 – 15 minutes Hero is going to look away three or four times, so each time he turns back to me I just keep adding a little more, building the picture. I know that unless he gets up to leave, I can easily sketch in his body when I’m happy with the head.

Basically, this is the method I would use to capture any creature. If you look at this one:-

It should illustrate the point. These guys came barrelling down my street one Saturday, in the opposite direction. There were a huge number of them. So when they started coming back, I knew that a lot of them would be coming past. I quickly sketched the moving parts – in this case the front legs of one horse – the back legs of another, and the body and heads of the next 3 or 4. Then another composite of the guys riding in the buggy. Now, when there’s only one of the creatures you want to sketch, the principle still works the same, as long as it doesn’t run off completely.

Whether you’re sketching people or creatures, even when they’re moving they do tend to repeat the same movements, and this fact is your friend. So if we take this sketch I made one lunchtime :-

It pretty much illustrates this point. Both of these were moving their heads about quite a bit, but would repeat pretty much the same position as they did so. I didn’t even start on the bodies until the heads were done, and this worked pretty well. 

Sketching living, moving creatures is hard, and it can be very frustrating. However, if you want to improve your sketching, it really is wonderful for training your hand-eye coordination, and also helping you to loosen up, and get a decent impression of what you’re sketching more quickly and with fewer marks on your paper. 

A few random points:-

·       Make the distinction in your own mind between an urban sketch and a detailed animal sketch. If the animal you’re sketching is just a part of a moment – for example, like the horses and buggies barrelling down my street – then please try to resist the temptation to photograph it now then sketch it later. Sketch it now, then you won’t need to photograph it. On the other hand, if you sketch a photograph of an exotic creature you would never normally meet, well you’re not going to try to pass it off as an urban sketch made the time that you actually met this creature, so I can’t see any issue with that.

·       Sketching a living creature from life – start off by sketching in the parts of the animal that are most likely to move. Go for quick outlines, and you can worry about shading later on.

·       Don’t panic if the creature moves. As likely as not it will repeat the same position if you’re patient. This won’t always happen, but this is what makes it so rewarding when it does.

·       You may have the opportunity to make a composite sketch of two or more members of the same species, so don’t despair.

·       When you first start sketching creatures from life – I’d start out trying to sketch it as quickly as you possibly can in as few marks on the paper. If you work on speed from the start, accuracy will come later.

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One Sketch #77) Landseer Lion in Trafalgar Square #30x30directwatercolorchallenge2018

I guard the Admiral's Column
By day, and then by night
Not bad when you consider
I have neither bark nor bite.

This is my 16th direct watercolour for the 2018 30x30 challenge, and I have to say that of all the paintings I've made so far, it's probably my favourite. This was all sketched with the brush as I painted it, and I don't think it would have been any better if I'd sketched any of it out in pencil beforehand. The only trouble with it is that my scanner is funny about certain colours - mostly blues, and so while this photo shows that the lion itself is a combination of blues and greens, in the sacan it's mostly greys.

One Sketch #74) Queen Victoria (Thursday 7th)

Our least amused monarch
Since Edward the Confessor
Was Victoria Regina et Imperatrix
God Bless 'Er!

On Wednesday night I watched a channel 5 documentary which did a real hatchet job on poor old Vicky - basically saying that she hated her children. Now, alright, she certainly wasn't the world's most hand on mum, but come on!

I quite like this one, it's based on a photograph of course - she doesn't pose for many life classes these days, does our Vick - but it looks like the kind of engraved illustration you might have got in a contemporary Illustrated London News.

One Sketch #69) #30x30watercolordirect2018 Margam Park Stag

I stand before you,
When all is done and said
Defiant, proud and tall
Don't you think my head
Looks far, far better
On me, than on a wall?

Yes, I'm afraid that I see myself using my watercolor direct sketches as my daily sketches for the time being. Let's look on the bright side, though. This specific challenge ends at the end of this month, and at the rate I'm going, there are going to be days when I'll make more than one watercolour - yesterday for example - and days when I won't make any, so there will be some ink sketches coming this month, I'm sure.

As for this choice, well, while I was in Kaunas in April I visited the Zoological Museum - where I sketched a coelacanth - and one thing I didn't like about it was a room literally full of mounted deer heads and antlers. As the verse says - I think they look far better still attached to the living animal.

One Sketch #67) Ibex

It cannot be too hard to cope
With the fact I'm not an antelope
So would you people please take note
Misnaming me really gets my goat.

Yes, I felt for variety's sake I ought to pick something other than a Swansea building to sketch for today, and so I came to settle on the ibex. Why? Well, I'm a long time quizzer, and the ibex is one of those creatures where people almost always get the wrong idea about what it is. If you ask people what sort of mammal is an ibex, I guarantee that the majority, if they answer at all, will call it an antelope. Yet it's a goat, and when you look at it, it is hard to imagine why anyone would think that it's anything else.