Play time. Week 8 of Liz Steel's sketch course.

Another fun day, but tinged with a little sadness that it was our last class. What a term we've had. Liz has taught us so much and continued to encourage us constantly throughout the duration of the course. There's been a shift in my sketching and the intensity of colour used , but I also recognise a change in confidence and my willingness to tackle things I would not previously try.

  

 

 

 

For our cafe sketch this week we went to Chica Bonita - a lively little restaurant in Manly with wonderful decor, music, vibe, food, drink, lighting. Everything just right for getting us to play. I ordered a watermelon margarita to further aid the loosening of the lines and decided to draw it against the backdrop of the tiles from the table and next to a feature from the wall. This sketch incorporates every bit of play technique I could remember from the earlier studio discussion - sketching with watercolour pencils, using a white chinagraph pencil (it resists the watercolour paint), salt (from my margarita glass), scraping wet paint with the credit card, white gel pen, wet on wet colours, splashing and most of all remembering not to be too serious about the outcome.

 

Thanks once more to Liz, its been a great learning experience. You can read more about this weeks class here on her blog.

 

Links to my posts on the earlier classes:

Week 1

Weeks 2 & 3

Weeks 4 & 5

Weeks 6 & 7

 

More lessons with Liz Steel - context and composition.

Having earlier touched on some fundamental drawing lessons for buildings, Weeks 6 and 7 of Liz Steel's Urban Sketching course was focussed on context and composition.

The aim of week 6 was creating life around an object (often a building). Placing the main object into context. This assists with the concept of creating a story for urban sketching. It's also an area I tend to neglect. Partly because I'm chicken.

Liz had us warm up in the studio with sketching from photos of models from art reference books.

 

These two faces were finished later from black and white photos.

We also drew trees and cars. Palms, Pines and Gums are the trees I associate the most with Sydney. My greens need a bit more oomph here - a bit more summer to them.  

Once finished in the studio, we were then off to Manly Wharf where we gathered at the traffic lights. Here we sketched people as they waited in the rain for the lights to change. Sketching people within a such a short time frame is all very new to me. I learnt quite a lot and know that I would have continued to bypass sketching people if it weren't part of this course. Having the direction of an accomplished sketcher who is encouraging and enthusiastic made a huge difference.

 

 

Week 7 was about Composition. Balancing a blend of text, headings and images around the page to again help tell a story about the location and also communicate the feeling and atmostphere of the moment.




My studio cup and saucer sketch.. without my unbalanced composition!

 

Liz challenged with randomly selected layouts. We had to sketch a cup and saucer onto the page in the assigned area and then build a balanced composition around it. My composition for this one was messy when I added the words. I painted it later at home, once I regained some confidence! Filling in text to balance composition with an image, whilst maintaing a flow of seemingly effortless prose  is due for a bit of development.

 

It came together a bit better when we then set out to sketch at one of my favourite cafes in Manly, Foundry Fiftythree: huge tables allowing plenty of room to sketch, unique items decorating the walls, cool teapots, good coffee and good food.

Sadly, we're nearing the end of our course with Liz. Just one more class and then we will be left to our own devices. Fortunately, Liz has taught us plenty, she shares a great deal of her ideas online and she is considering teaching more courses. If you'd like to read more about her classes Liz shares her ideas here, and you can also find reviews of Liz's course on class mate Suzi Poland's blog.

Google Reader finishes on June 30 2013. Have you found an alternative?

I'm still a little surprised that Google Reader will cease to exist as of 1 July 2013. But there are of course other options to help you follow your favourite blogs. I rely quite heavily on facebook (I'm here) for news on what other sketchers are up to and for just a few of my very favourite blogs I subscribe via email (you can sign up to mine over there on the right). But I still like to wander through my blog feed occassionally and I've found Bloglovin' good for this.

How to Import Your RSS subscriptions from Google Reader to Bloglovin’

First, click here:

http://www.bloglovin.com/import/reader

Then it will bring you to this page:

Click that blue button that says “Import from Google Reader”

UPDATE: Thanks to Liz, Lisa and Emily for your helpful suggestion. I'm giving Feedly a try now and its looking very good! It seems to offer many more things than just being a blog reader which is encouraging.

I also post to Flickr if that's more your style : )  You can find me here.

Do you have another way to follow blogs that's working well? I'm keen to know! Please share!

Colour.

I've been heavily reliant on a technical knowledge of watercolours, colour mixing, colour wheels etc that was learnt in about grade 4 (about 10 years old?) and not greatly developed since then. It's been a wonderful way to work and play. Frankly, I have enjoyed being naive about certain things because there is a level of freedom to it. As if I can't be held responsible for creating better watercolour work due to my ignorance of how to do it. But now I want to move on. 

 

Thankfully, surrounding this (slightly embarrassing) realisation has been the course I'm taking with Liz Steel and her fantastic knowledge, experience and ethusiasm. Liz's passion for watercolour pigments is evident in her work as well as commentary.

 

In our class we covered hue, value, intensity, cool vs warm, use of complementary colours for shadows, mixing colours, wet/damp/dry technique comparison and more. I took many notes and drew pictures and painted colours. But until I start mixing these colours and  using the techniques in sketches, repetitively, none of the newer concepts are easy for me to recall.

 

 

Pittwater Road, Manly

As part of the course we had the option of setting up our travel watercolour palettes with Liz's current favourite colours. Awesome. Now I can at least go forth with my own changes knowing I have a good platform to work from.  With a handy selection of Daniel Smith colours set into half pans, the above was my first outdoors/onsite trial of the new paints.

 

 

 

The following class focussed on buildings. Here we recalled some of what we did early on in the course in relation to form, structure, detail as well as more discussion on perspective.

 

 

 

 

We completed a few very simplified line drawings of incredible, historic, beautiful archtiecture such as Notre Dame from photos (totally gullibe to Liz's clever strategy of boosting our confidence in sketching buildings) and then headed down the Corso, to St Matthews Church. There I became engrossed in detail,  forgetting most of what she'd just taught us about keeping it simple. In order to complete the full picture - both lines and colour on site I still need to work faster. This one was coloured at home.  

 

 I've also created a colour mixing chart from my new palette.  I then set about to further absorb how my colours mix by sketching a Classic Rover from one of my photos, using predominantly just French Ultramine Blue and Burnt Umber. I snuck in some Moonglow because it looked pretty comfortable with the other two. This was really helpful for me to understand how the colours work together.