Pushing Your Sketching Boundaries Pt3

The third part was posted HERE... please follow the link to read it. Thank you.

Pushing your sketching boundaries workshop pt 2

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Pushing Your Sketching Boundaries Workshop Part 1

1st drawing of workshop. ©Sue Pownall 2015

With Degas on the mend, I was able to attend the UrbanSketchers Coventry workshop this week. However, needing to leave her with the dogsitter for as short a period as possible, I arrived almost on time for the start of the first workshop, but missed the night before's drink and draw registration event. I also left before the end on Friday, partially due to Friday/end of Easter week traffic, but also as I wanted to see how she was. In between was a great event, arranged and tutored by Isabel Carmona, Swasky, and Simone Ridyard.

On the wall at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

With no time to settle, it was straight in with recording the old cathedral in Swasky's workshop on Bending the Floor. The result is above, and I have to confess it's my favourite of the three days. The workshop was ran alongside the Recording Britain exhibition, at the Herbert, and copies of our drawings are there until the end of the month.

The second exercise was more complex, and although I didn't do it correctly, I am also pleased with my representation of the Herbert and adjacent university buildings. (below)  

In the afternoon we drew lots of portraits of each other, which was fun, and Simone took this great photo of us (below).

Exhaused, we retired to the nearby pub for food, drinks, and, of course, more sketching.

Drinking and drawing

Cathedral in evening light. Sorry about the poor photo.

 Parts 2 and 3 will be posted on Tuesday and Thursday. I hope you come back to check them out. Please remember I love receiving your comments.

Manchester sketchcrawl

Sketching the River Irwell sat on Calatrava's Trinity Bridge

 Yesterday,  I joined the Manchester,  Yorkshire,  and Society of Architectural Illustrators (SAI) for a sketchcrawl in Manchester. It was a surprisingly blue skied sunny day, but with an icy wind, which made outdoor sketching a challenge. As you can see from my sketches below, I alternated between outside and inside locations.

River Irwell from Trinity bridge. Sketch 1

I accidently bought a scone when I went for a warm up cuppa. Sketch 2.

Piano practice in Manchester Central Library's music library. Sketch 3.

Shivering and sketching at the end of the day. Sketch 4.

It was lovely to meet so many sketchers from all over (40+ at the interim lunch meeting) and hope to get up to Manchester and sketch again... albeit in a warmer month.

Show and tell social at the end of the day. Photo by Hakym.

Focusing on something different.

Spring greenhouse ©Sue Pownall 2015

It's been a busy couple of weeks. I had a weekend away and my poor assistant has been in Queen's Veterinary School Hospital, Cambridge for surgery on her elbows. She now needs lots of love and cuddles to help her recover.

My assistant is feeling sorry for herself.

I have mainly been creative in a photographic way, apart from a couple of sketches. The above one was drawn at my friend's house in Cheltenham over the course of 2 cups of tea, finishing just in time for breakfast. (sorry the scan has lost some of the watercolour details and turned it pink too). We have had surprisingly clear blue skies, which has made the UK spring look prettier. Here's a few examples... and a fire as the nights are still cold.

Cheltenham ©Sue Pownall 2015

Reflections in yellow, Cambridge. ©Sue Pownall 2015

Bath. ©Sue Pownall 2015

A single stem. ©Sue Pownall 2015

Abingdon. ©Sue Pownall 2015

 What have you done this week?

Print workshop induction

I'm now a member of the print workshop at Cuckoo Farm Studios, Colchester.  Consequently, on Thursday I had my induction to use the workshop unsupervised in the future. Whilst there I took the opportunity to have a 2nd attempt at etching. I used one of my new etching needles, which is quite heavy and a dream to draw with into the hard ground. I redid the oak leaves I'd attempted to etch on my workshop, you can see those results here.

Learning points:

1. I need to clean the ink off the plates more, as you can see from the print above there is a lot of ink on the background.
2. I need to pay more attention to the composition. Despite it being an interesting subject (well I think so), as this print doesn't work due to the shape the leaves create... I could use a clean hard ground to work more into this plate, but I'm not sure that will improve a badly thought out compostion.

What printmaking lessons have you learnt?

Lunar New Year - Chinese Year of the Ram

Are you looking for my Chinese new year illustration? Please click  HERE  to go to it.

Digital drawings and a dozy dog.

On Friday, I took Degas to the vets and sketched her as she fought the sedative she was given. She had xrays on her bad leg. There were no obvious fractures or other skeletal problem, but they are being sent for a second opinion. So the question remains, why is she still limping and not getting better?

8th Feb Experimenting with digital drawing.

Last weekend, I finally got a tab and having tried my first digital sketch at the last Urban Sketchers Symposium (click here to see it)  downloaded a couple of apps. Thanks Omar Jaramillo for the app info. Check out his great watercolours here. These are my first digital doodles:

9th Feb. Still playing. Digital sketch of Korean teacup.

9th Feb. More doodles.

11th hmm need to buy a stylus!

10th Feb. 1st ‪digital‬ ‪sketch‬ of Degas. Unfortunately, the background didn't look so dark in the app.

Final things from this week:

Although I'm only three quarters of the way through the Monologue A5 sketchbook, which I started 27th December at the Winter Wonderland sketchcrawl, I have abandoned it. The main reasons are the perferations and the wrinkling of the paper when water is applied. I tried 2 pages of a Canson but the ink smudges, so I will probably go back to my favourite Daler Ebony sketchbooks.

I started tutoring the mixed media course and will report on that at another time. The first course photo can be seen on my facebook page and instagram @suepownallartist15

Uprooted, 28x17cm Watersoluble ink. Available to purchase.

Lastly, I have a finished drawing, the first of the year, seen here. It's a bit of an experiment as I used watersoluble ink.

What have you done this week?

Studying with Liz

As mentioned last week, I have been studying on Liz Steel's Sketching Now online course. Stretched over 12 weeks, Liz has covered all the foundations of successful sketching in well-thought out lessons presented in Liz's charming and exuberant fashion. Each week, there has been an indoor and outdoor prompt. I have missed one week entirely (week 9), only managed 2 of the outdoor prompts, but have managed the majority of the indoor ones. 

Despite being a regular urban sketcher, during the last few months of 2014 I had felt lost. However, having worked through this course, on the 11th January I wrote alongside my coursework:

I LOVE DETAILING LIKE THIS!!!... Using class to remember who I am.

 In the first lesson we had to draw our current sketching kit, which is something I've not done before. My Super5 pen has since run out of ink and I've replaced the Super5 Atlantic ink with Noodler's blueblack. I prefer the Atlantic, but can't get it here in UK and the postage is too high from Germany.

My biggest struggle has been with doing set up lines. When sketching, I normally work directly in ink and sometimes use dots as a guide to key points of a sketch. I can see the value of doing a minimal set up for complex scenes, but, I struggle to observe properly in pencil. Is it because I can change it? I struggled with that throughout the course. Right is an example from week 4.

Liz's course was very comprehensive, and I'd thoroughly recommend doing one if you have the chance. It was good to be reminded of some of the basics, and to try out the exercises. shh don't tell Liz but I frequently got halfway through some exercises and had totally forgotten what I was "supposed"  to be doing. I aslo frequently missed off adding the colour.

One of my favourite exercises and results was looking at shapes. I finally drew my Korean teacup that I bought in 2001 and has been in storage until now. It was supposed to be in 2 colours but I loved the shapes as it was, which is half the fun of experimenting within a class situation.

Finally, here's an outside sketch for week 10 that is not of a subject that I would normally choose, but captures a snapshot of dad's garden in winter. If you want to see my other sketches for this course, they are all in an album on flickr: Sketching Now coursework 

The high panel fence between myself & the neighbours with little foilage due to the winter.

Around the World Blog Hop

Looking for my Around the World Blog Hop post? Then please click HERE to go to it.