Secret Garden

Secret Garden. Pen & ink. 380 x 260mm. © Sue Pownall 2011

Apart from a few tweeks here and there, this is now finished. Thank you everyone who made suggestions whilst it was still a work in progress and I was a little lost. This piece is a lot darker than my normal work, I wonder if that's due to my health. Below are some of the stages it went through to end up like this.

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Sketching Cressing Temple Barns

African chair.

When I went to see the Tempest at the end of August, I was very happy to run into a friend I'd lost contact with. We went to school and then art college together. Over the years, despite us both moving around, we had infrequently ran into each other until around 15 years ago, when our paths stopped crossing . However, since the performance, we've been out for a drink and yesterday spent the afternoon sketching around the Cressing Temple Barns site. Her husband is the park ranger there (no sign of Yogi or Boo Boo though), so they live on site. Walking in to meet her there were so many things I wanted to try and capture I'd have to visit every day for a month to even scratch the surface. An inspiration place to be. I did 7 sketches, not all very successfully as I think I was having to much fun to concentrate, so I am only posting a few.

Kitchen beam & bells.

It is taking a while to get use to the Windsor & Newton sketchbook, as the paper takes washes in a different way to the previous Daler one. The paper is less porous, so I'm finding that to get intense colours I must use less water or wait ages for the first washes to dry, not easy on a showery autumnal day like yesterday. Also, having perforated pages there is a strong temptation to remove bad sketches.

View through Wheat Barn doors.

Site cat on the kitchen windowsill.

Paula & I sketching in the walled garden.

The Tempest

On a stormy evening, I went to a brilliant performance of the Tempest held, luckily, inside at Cressing Temple Barns. A benefit of going alone was that I got a seat in the front row alongside the reserved guest seats, and so I sketched and painted the barn behind the scenery before the performance started. As is normal with a Shakespeare performance I  got a little confused in a few places, but the terrific acting made up for it. It was performed by the professional touring group: The Festival Players Theatre Company. The beautiful setting added to the fantastic performance, so did the musical elements.

I sketched a few of the actors in the first half (adding the colour later), but found the performance too engaging to do much and put my sketchbook away in the interval. I may add a figure into the stage setting later, as that is what I planned when I drew it.

The sketchbook pages.