Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This ‘half-hour’ watercolour demonstration, again following the step-by-steps in Paul Talbot-Greaves’ Collins 30 Minute Landscapes in Watercolour, actually took me almost an hour but, as with any watercolour, part of that was waiting for the paint to dry.
I went wrong with the colour wash for the distant trees, accidentally mixing a darker green intended for the middle-distance trees. In trying to dilute this mid-wash, I ended up with wash-backs. But they do have a dendritic look to them!
I’m getting a bit more confident as I work through the Half-Hour Demos in Paul Talbot-Greaves’ 30 Minute Landscapes in Watercolour.
I would normally follow the contours of a landscape in pen, as if the nib was tracing the routes that a climber might take over the outcrops of rock. Those foreground boulders would have been hatched with strata. Following the suggestions for this exercise, my initial pencil drawing amounts to perhaps a couple of dozen lines: if I’d been out on location, I would probably have got absorbed in the geological detail and I would have lavished that number of pen strokes on one or two of the rocks.
I’m learning to trust the viewer to complete the picture, so I’m realising that the decision of what to leave out of a painting can be as important as deciding what to put in. Less can be more, so I particularly enjoyed suggesting the billowing cloud with the crisp edge of the initial wash of Cobalt Blue for the sky. Following Talbot-Greaves’ example, I didn’t even start with an indication of the shape of the cloud in pencil. It’s such a pleasure to just draw with the brush.
Also new to me was the suggestion of using a quarter inch flat brush for the shadows and the rock formations. Its chisel-shaped marks give an impression of blocky rocks. I’ll definitely use it again, in fact I’ll treat myself to some new flat sable brushes as my old sable flats are now rather splayed (and that number 8, above, has a warped handle!).
Link: Paul Talbot-Greaves
‘Sometimes working in a different medium can add that all-important spark of excitement’, writes Paul Talbot-Greaves in Collins 30 minute Landscapes in Watercolour. As a new year refresher, I’m trying out one of his half-hour demos.
I’m stepping out of my comfort zone because my habitual way of working is to start with a pen and ink drawing, then add a wash of colour but here, after a minimal pencil outline, it’s blocks of colour first and any suggestion of detail, such as the pattern of stones, is left until you add the final touches.
I’ve noticed recently that my brushes are looking the worse for wear, so before starting I bought two sable brushes.
I’m interested in Talbot-Greaves’ choice of colours; I try and keep things simple by sticking to a couple of versions of each of the primaries in the pocket-sized watercolour box that I use on my travels but he suggests some useful shortcuts:
“There are a number of ready-mixed colour, such as Raw Sienna, Sap Green and French Ultramarine, which have been developed to make colour selection easier for the artist. Each one is like a shortcut to a popular colour that is found in the landscape – for example, Sap Green can be used to paint grass, Cobalt Blue is a good match for sky blue, and Cadmium Red is ideal for suggesting the warm glow of a sunset.”
The colours in my version of the demo aren’t as subtle as they are in the book and I think that could be due to having a brighter, yellower version of Sap Green in my range of watercolours and having to use Lemon Yellow and Indian Red as substitutes for two of his recommended colours: Naples Yellow and Light Red.
For the purpose of the exercise, all the colours are mixed on the paper, blended into each other, as you paint, not mixed in the palette beforehand. I need more practice at this; the wash-backs in the sky and on the road are caused by adding a bit too much water to my wash as I blended it with a still damp colour on the page.
I’ve learned a lot from trying another approach and look forward to trying another of the 30 minute demos in the book.
Links
Collins 30 minute Landscapes in Watercolour is currently out of print.
A few sketches from our visits to Barbara’s brother who is currently in the stroke unit in the Brontë Tower, Dewsbury Hospital.
The parlour palm sits in a corner by the piano in the dining room.
11 a.m.: Looking WSW from the Brontë Tower. Mist obscures the moor tops, Castle Hill showing as a misty outline.
Lenny is a tall for his age two-year old. The only time that he really settles down is when he stands to eat some ice cream but he trots off between spoonfuls so my sketch is as much reconstruction as observation.
Would he recognise himself?
‘Who’s that?’ asks his mum, showing him my sketch.
‘Lenny’, he replies immediately.
Florence, Lenny’s younger sister, is still too young to form such a clear sense of self. Her mum tell’s us that there’s a theory that a young baby doesn’t conceive that there is a separation between itself and its mother.
Facial recognition is something that humans are good at from an early age but we can be a bit too keen to spot faces. An etcher I know asks her friends to check her proofs for any rogue faces that might have popped up in her foliage, stonework and clouds before she commits to printing the finished version.
I can even spot a face in Barbara’s homemade mince pies . . .
. . . these two crusty old characters remind me of Statler and Waldorf on The Muppet Show.
The fruit of the Rhododendron is a woody capsule which splits to release small seeds which can remain viable in the ground for years.
This fruit had fallen from one of the Rhododendron bushes by the Middle Lake at Nostell Priory.
A Victorian visitor gives us a description of Nostell Park in its Victorian heyday:
“The noble avenue of elms, stretching like giant sentries almost as far as the eye can reach from the house, the green sward dotted here and there with herds of deer ; the waterfall, its silvery cascade gleaming brightly through a network of green ; the lake, with its ripple dancing in the sunlight, and bordered by the rhododendrons, varying in shade from deep red to pale pink and white,—all went to make a collection of pictures it would be difficult to equal.”
Leeds Mercury, 22 June, 1888
Our plans for the weekend are put on hold as we head for the hospital to visit a relative (he’s doing much better now). I’ve spent many hours waiting in hospitals but, as usual, I’ve brought my sketchbook and pen with me and this time a tiny pack of crayons. They’re a very limited range, just seven colours, but working out how to represent the range of colours reflected and refracted in the bottle of Harrogate Spa water takes my mind off a worrying situation.
Late afternoon and I pull in at the viewpoint to photograph the cloudscape as we cross the moor top between Hawes and Langstrothdale.
“I think those clouds are caused by air rising as it moves over a hill,” I suggest to the man who has pulled in just behind us to photograph them on his iPad, “I’ve been reading The Cloudspotter’s Guide, but I can’t remember what they’re called.”
“Lenticular clouds?”
“That’s right; you are a cloud spotter?”
“No . . . just nutty!”
Just as I’ve got myself back in the car and out of the cool breeze, I notice another cloud-spotting feature to the left of the lenticular cloud that is hanging above Ingleborough and I grab my camera.
“Have you seen the sun-dog?” I ask the man with the iPad; “They’re caused by ice crystals in high clouds refracting the light and they always appear at a certain distance from the sun – I think it’s something like 23 degrees.”
“I wonder if that’s because we’re at 53 degrees north?” He surmises.
I wasn’t too far out, it’s 22° but the phenomenon is a halo effect caused by tiny ice crystals in translucent cloud, so the effect is independent of latitude.
Half an hour later I take the opportunity to photograph sunset over the top end of the dale from the first floor window of our barn conversion accommodation at Nethergill Farm.
It’s the first time that I’ve tried the ‘sunset’ setting on my camera. It might have warmed up the colours a little but it’s more successful than the camera’s default setting which attempts to adjust the exposure to make the scene resemble regular daylight.
It so good to be back in my studio and working again. I’ve just e-mailed my latest Wild Yorkshire nature diary off to the Dalesman, so it’s high time that I caught up with this online diary, which provides most of the raw material for my Dalesman articles.
It’s a month since my studio floor was taken up but there’s been a lot of work for me varnishing the new tongued and grooved timber floor and putting back my plan chest, art materials and book stock just as I’d like them (and there’s been even more work setting up our new kitchen in the room below, which is looking great).
Improvements in my studio include these four Ikea Blecka hooks (above) for my small, medium and large art bags, which are hanging there ready for me to grab when I set off on a small, medium or large adventure, each complete with a selection of art materials and an A6, A5 or a square of the narrow side of A4 (that’s 8 x 8 inches) Pink Pig sketchbook. Like Goldilocks, I tend to feel that the middle sized bag is ‘just right’.
On the fourth hook my new digital SLR is hanging, plus a camera bag holding my new macro and telephoto lens. It’s an Olympus OM-D E-M10II which has great possibilities for nature photography. I sold my trusty pocket-sized Olympus Tough muji on e-Bay and I’m missing it already but I’m holding off buying the latest Tough to replace it as I want to get thoroughly familiar with my digital SLR.
The drawing is in bamboo pen using Winsor & Newton black Indian ink. I wouldn’t pack this combination in my art bags as the ink, where it has formed a blotty pool, takes days to dry.
This is a first for me: writing and uploading a blog post on my iPad as my studio is out of action for a couple of days and my wall-mounted iMac is taking a well-earned break, lying on the bed in the back bedroom. We hadn’t realised that revamping the kitchen downstairs would involve taking up the floor upstairs in the studio to fit the new LED lights. This gave me the ideal opportunity to get Simon, the joiner fitting our kitchen, to replace the chipboard floor in the studio with tongued and grooved boards. It will all be worth it and the old kitchen is already looking more sparkly.
My scanner is out of action for a few days too so here’s an iPad photograph of the latest spread in my A6 ‘Travel Journal’ sketchbook with sketches from a rainy morning at Nostell, a train journey to Leeds and from the centre of Wakefield.