More Landscape Sketches

More of my landscape practice sketches..

Watersoluble and dry Coloured Pencils

Watersoluble and Dry Coloured Pencils

Watercolour paints plus Watersoluble and Dry Coloured Pencils

Penhale Sands Sketches

Just realised I forgot to post these landscape sketches of Penhale Sands in Cornwall...

Lots of Landscape Sketching Practice

I've been continuing to practice my landscape sketching in water media as much as possible. Here are some of the better ones:

Landscape Sketches

I've been wanting to have a go at learning landscape techniques for a long while and I've finally started. I've been reading up and watching tutorials, and have started a practice sketchbook. I started out drawing with ink lines but I don't like the look of the ink lines so I've abandoned the ink pen and now I just do a quick light pencil sketch to map in the main shapes before adding colour with watercolour paint and watercolour pencils.

With initial ink pen sketches.

I definitely prefer without the ink lines.

So I'm finally on my way with my landscape learning journey. I'm keen to keep it loose and immediate,  not to tighten up and focus on detail (as I tend to with botanicals and wildlife). I think a lot of practice is going to be needed, but I'm really enjoying it, which is all that really matters.

Blue Tits

I drew these sketches of blue tits a while ago but forgot to post them. I think they are slightly too fuzzy-looking in texture, but I'm happy with the colours.

Rose Hips

Another botanical sketch I forgot to post previously! Coloured pencils on Winsor & Newton sketchbook paper. This paper is not suitable for layering coloured pencil, so I really struggled, but managed eventually to achieve a reasonable range of tones and fairly rich colours.  The scan hasn't done it any favours though - the colours of the different types of hips look very similar here but they actually aren't.

Botanical Sketches

Some more coloured pencil sketches - I did these back ago in the autumn but didn't get round to posting them!  I was trying out different papers with these, trying to figure out which sketchbook paper is best for dry pencil and which works well with watercolour pencils (I used a wash of watercolour pencil as a base layer for the poppy seed heads).

Sycamore Seeds:

Dried Poppy Seed Heads:

Honesty Seed Heads:

Pussy Willow Stems

I wanted to see if I could capture the fuzzy quality of Pussy Willow buds in coloured pencil. I used the embossing technique before adding colour, to retain some bright white lines. I realised afterwards that it would have been much easier to use coloured paper to make the white buds stand out, but overall I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out.

Adonis Blue Butterfly in Coloured Pencil

My first large butterfly study in coloured pencil. I found the hairy body extremely difficult to capture accurately - with such tiny pencil strokes it's very hard to retain the highlights. I loved using all my blues though - they are the least used colours in my box! (Unfortunately the scanning process has made it look all shade of blue, but actually I used everything from Light Cobalt Turquoise to Indanthrene blue.

Crab Apples

I'm trying out different sketchbook papers, to see which I like best. Some work much better with coloured pencils than others. Here's a study of crab apples I did on Winsor and Newton sketchbook paper. I like the brightness of the colours with this paper.

Bumblebees

Bumblebee sketchbook pages.

And my version of an identification guide of common British bees.  The artist of the original guide kindly gave me permission to use it as a reference guide for my coloured pencil version.

Siberian Iris in Coloured Pencil

This is actually an exercise in one of my Billy Showell instructional books (A-Z of Flower Portraits). I did it in watercolour first, but then I decided to also do it in coloured pencil, and I prefer this coloured pencil version.

Coloured Pencil Sketchbooking

Some of my sketchbook pages.

Blue Cityscape

More sketchy experimentation using watercolour, black ink and white pen.

 

 

One Drawing a Day again

I have been doing my One Drawing a Day again for the past few weeks. I've loosened up my strokes a bit and I'm also trying to draw people in a less stylised, more realistic way. Here's a few of last week/ this week's scribbles...

One Drawing A Day

To improve my drawing skills and confidence, I am trying to sketch every day at the moment, even if it is just a quick doodle.  I plan to use the 'One drawing a day' book for some ideas, but so far it's just quick pen or pencil sketches of whatever is in my head at the time.

I've never blogged sketches before because they tend to be a) messy, b) a bit weird, c) decidedly unimpressive and d) covered in random nonsense scribbled in my worst handwriting.  However, I'm feeling isolated doing this One Drawing a Day thing on my own and I want to stay focused, so I've decided to ignore these worries and blog my daily doodles for six weeks in the hope that someone else might decide to join in with me, or at least talk to me about it!

First Week's Sketches - mostly people, all pigment pen (terrible photo - too lazy to scan them separately!)

Second Week - fish, landscape and strange Pierrot people. All pencil.

Last Week's Sketches - people on the bus, isolated buildings, doodles (all pigment pen)

 

Last Sketchbook Project Pages

A couple more pages from my Sketchbook Project, which I managed to finish and which is now winging its way over to Brooklyn NY.  I was trying out my new Rotring ink cartridge pen here, plus watersoluble crayons.