Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I photographed ear fungus growing on a log at Nostell this morning and I’ve made a start on a watercolour, working from the photograph, this afternoon.
Starting with a pencil drawing, I’m adding the lightest colour in each area. This initial wash looks exotically bright for the subject of fungi on an old log but, as you can see from the detail from my photograph, there’s a surprising amount of colour there.
The next stage will be to add the darker washes.
4 p.m.: This afternoon, the light is much the same as yesterday, so I get a chance to finish my watercolour. Working with a finer brush, a number 6 sable round, I start with the branches in the upper left-hand corner and work my way downwards.
I’m painting in a Pink Pig sketchbook on 270 gsm Ameleie watercolour paper which is smoother than the 300 gsm variety that I was using at the weekend but, as you can see from the close up, it still gives a hint of texture in the washes. It’s smooth enough to take a pen line.
It takes me about 45 minutes to an hour to finish the watercolour.
Link: Pink Pig sketchbooks
This afternoon, instead of starting with a pen drawing, I quickly sketched the outlines in pencil then, working from the sky downwards, I added a wash of the lightest background colour in each area.
It’s the same technique as the ‘half-hour’ demonstrations that I followed at the weekend but I find that working from life gives me a lot more freedom as I’m not trying to follow a series of step-by-step instructions. The dark masses of the bare ashes and willows are varied so as I work I keep adding touches of sap green, French ultramarine or sepia to my background colour, blending them wet-in-wet.
With only twenty minutes available, I don’t get the chance to move onto the next stage which would have been adding details such as twisting branches, patches of ivy and darker patches.
“This demonstration is about brush control and technique,” writes Paul Talbot-Greaves in 30 minute Landscapes in Watercolour, “both are essential for describing the waves crashing over rocks.”
The technique of scumbling involves pulling a not-too-wet brush across the paper but this didn’t work out quite as I intended for the sky. This might have been because the colour that I used, Cerulean Blue, tends to dry to a granular texture. I didn’t have the recommended colour, Phthalo Blue, in my watercolour box.
Like the snow scene that I tried yesterday, this watercolour is an example of deciding what to leave out, as the spray is represented by the white of the watercolour paper.
A theme through the four half-hour step-by-steps that I’ve tried this weekend has been keeping the colours that you use in a watercolour to a minimum. There are five colours in this painting and only four were needed for the snow scene. For example, the pale wash on the surf is the same colour mix as the darker patches of the sea – Cerulean Blue and Lemon Yellow – just very much diluted.
My thanks again to Paul Talbot-Greaves for devising these watercolour demonstrations and explaining the process so clearly.
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
I sometimes get the feeling that, rather than drawing a comic strip, I’m acting as production designer and storyboard artist for a big budget movie of The Life of Charles Waterton.
I’ve been watching period dramas such as Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which is set in the same period and was filmed in Yorkshire on locations that included two Georgian streets in Wakefield which Waterton would have known.
The BBC Films 2012 version of Great Expectations included costumes and scenes that would have been perfect for my comic strip. At the climax of the film there’s a scene on the Thames which had me thinking about the dawn procession of boats across Walton Lake which was arranged for Waterton’s funeral.
In today’s illustration – a premonition of Waterton’s funeral – I tried to suggest dawn light on eddies in the water. The gradation of watercolour from lemon yellow to indigo called for some forward planning. My Winsor & Newton watercolour box didn’t have enough divisions in the palette for all the colours, so I moved on to another box for the French ultramarine and indigo.
Having the plant right there in front of me should make it easy but, like all flowers, this potato is a restless sitter.
It takes me longer than I think to get so far and I’m far from satisfied with the result but the end result isn’t really the point of the exercise;
‘You can only reproduce something well if you [see and observe]. If you can decode what you see, you will be able to explain it, and anyone who sees your drawing will be able to understand it. The artist’s view is just as important and personal as the subject itself.’
Agathe Haevermans, Drawing and Painting the Seashore
I’m happy just to spend the day observing and hopefully turning that into a successful botanical drawing will follow on from that.
In Impressionism by sampling spots of colour in a detached way, you should be able to build up a convincing image even of an object in the landscape that you can’t identify. Courbet was supposedly able to accurately paint a patch on a distant hillside without ever asking what it was – a limestone outcrop, a patch of dried vegetation or a pile of chippings. The colour and texture were enough.
With botanic drawing you’re really trying to deconstruct then reconstruct the subject in order to clearly explain it.
Perhaps I should have taken the flower apart before I started drawing.
The Peace Lily, Spathiphyllum wallisii, is stemless, the leaves and flowers growing directly from the compost. Although it is from tropical America the leaves can be damaged by strong sunlight.
The flower reminds me of the cuckoo flower. It consists of a spadix – the sausage-shaped flowerhead – which is sheathed in a spathe; a leaf-like bract. The spathe is white to start with but gradually turns pale green.
Drawn with HB Derwent Graphic pencil which I sharpened to a fine point on a metal emery board. Watercolours are White Night. I prefer Winsor and Newton but White Nights are perfectly acceptable and I’ve got a greater range of colours in a larger box.
Instead of the waterbrush that I normally use, I’ve gone for a Cotman no. 10 field brush and a Cotman no. 3 reversible (brush fits into handle). The number 3 is finer than I’d normally use but I’m trying to manage without a fine pen to provide sharpness in the botanical details.
WE’RE A BIT limited as to where we can take my mum for a coffee now that she’s not as mobile but the ice cream parlour at Whitley has a lot going for it. Yes, it might be the same place that we brought her last week and the week before but the panorama, looking up the Calder valley to the tops of the Pennines is different each time we visit. It has greened up a lot since we were last here. But it changes every few minutes as shadows of clouds move across pasture, wood and moor.
It’s so good to have a short burst of the wide open spaces.
I like watercolours where forms are simplified so why do I find it impossible not to make some attempt to blob in every tree when I’m painting this view? The problem is that I’m so fascinated by detail. As I painted this I could see the blades of the wind turbines turning on the horizon, traffic passing on the motorway 6 miles away, crows bursting from the wood beyond the reservoir as a buzzard flew over . . .
It’s so difficult not to get hooked on the detail!