ONLINE ART COURSE – SMALL SKETCHES IN WATERCOLOUR AND INK PENS PT 2

This afternoon my hubby and I sat down to complete this project with the final four of eight small sketches of buildings using watercolour and ink pens in a very loose sketchy style.

I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy this as the loose sketchy style isn’t really my thing, but I ended up enjoying it immensely. I think I did better with the first four, which were based on a more rural theme, but I don’t think I did too badly with these more urban ones.

The first one was of Tower Bridge, which Phil, the teacher, called “London Bridge.” Many decades ago the Americans bought London Bridge and had it shipped over and reconstructed somewhere over there – why anyone would want to do such a thing is beyond me and it must have cost a fortune to do it! What was worse is that they thought they were getting the iconic Tower Bridge. It must have been a huge disappointment when they opened their Amazon box to find the wrong bridge inside. Much better to stick to Lego.

Anyway, here’s my real Tower Bridge, which I think we shall be keeping, and not selling to anyone!

As before, we worked two sketches on a single page. At the bottom of this page, we drew the Pantheon in Rome.

Here are the two together on the single page.

Then we did the Gooderham Building, which is in Toronto in Canada. I am not familiar with this building but it’s a very unusual shape, like the Flatiron Building in New York. It is also known as the Flatiron Building.

For this one, Phil set us a bit of a challenge. We were supposed to do the ink drawing first, and then, looking at the reference photo, note down the different colours to be used, then put the reference photo away and do the painting from our notes. I have to admit to cheating and referring to the reference, and even so I didn’t get it quite right. The colours looked a lot flatter and less varied than Phil’s version.

The final drawing was of a narrow street in Greece. Again, Phil set us a challenge, this time to do the watercolouring first, and then refine it with the ink pen work afterwards. This meant judging the relative distances and sizes of the various blocks of colour.

It was only when I added the pen work that I realised I’d made several mistakes – missing out bits of wall, and mashing various windows together! It would be a fun exercise, lining it up with the reference, and playing “spot the difference.”

Phil told us to use the reference, and not our watercolour marks, as the guide to doing the ink drawing. That would be OK for minor errors, but for big ones like mine it would be a step too far, so to a certain extent I did have to follow what I’d already done.

Here are the final two drawings on the single page. This time the page was set in landscape orientation as both these pictures were tall and narrow.

Altogether an interesting project in this watercolour and ink pen module. This is a completely different way of using the pens from what I am accustomed to and it’s been fun experimenting with being really loose and sketchy with this one.

Professor Clara Lieu of ArtProf has done some livestreams with timed figure drawings at high speed. Working with pen direct, without the props of pencil and eraser, and just going with the flow, can seem a bit scary, but you have to commit yourself and just dive in and press on regardless of the consequences, and it’s actually very good training. Phil said that this is what many artists do “on the hoof” out and about, sketching what they see, and perhaps making notes of the colours they see, in readiness for making a more careful and detailed drawing/painting back in the studio. The exercise that we have done in this project is clearly very good training for this, and even though we may get the proportions and perspective slightly off, it’s good practice and eventually one would end up being more accurate just through experience.

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