watercolour and pencil
I don't have any finished pieces ready this month, so here's the grand standby, Window Work – my regular rapid drawing exercises of people in the street outside.
The last Window Work blog was way back in August last year, and you might expect, as I did, that I'd have had a lot of sketches to choose from. Unfortunately, I was horrified to find that my drawing had been so bad over the rest of the year that there was nothing worth posting. Perhaps I'd just been going through the motions and not really concentrating on looking. Anyway, why ever that was, these are all from the last two months, which have produced not a bad hit-rate, and a few quite effective sketches.
These are watercolour (the usual Paynes Grey) and a pencil sketch. In the latter, the loose vagueness of line works quite well to suggest that particular figure's shambling gait.
Using watercolour, for some time I've had a little mini-crisis about what brushes to use for these exercises. I went out and bought a couple of small proper sables, which I found far too 'blobby' and difficult to control at speed, and then I had a go with some (much cheaper!) synthetics, a couple of which are quite good – they are slightly stiffer than sable and produce a very reliable and constant line. However, they don't hold and retain much paint, so when scribbling a figure and starting at the head and shoulders, I have to re-charge the brush by the time I get to the legs - see how, in the girl at the top right, the legs are a lighter tone than the upper body; the brush is almost drained. Because they don't load heavily, they're not particularly great for areas of tone either. They're fine for solid and dependable marks, though, if you've enough time, as in the upper centre-right sketch of the girl with boots and a bag.
So I went back to using Oriental brushes. I'd discovered these decades ago at college, and used them for both larger and smaller scale watercolours – and doing fast sketch-work. They have a wide but light bamboo handle, and come in combinations of different hairs. Characteristically, the hair bundle has a large belly, which holds a lot of paint, and tapers down to a very fine point (I'm sure I've written about them before). Anyway, they require a little more daring to use effectively, and care has to be taken with preparing the 'point', especially at this tiny scale, but I think most people would agree that the four figures done with my favourite Oriental brush are far more dynamic and interesting than the upper-right pair, and, like the pencil sketch, they actually do tell a truth about the subjects. I find the widely available pure white - very, very, soft - goat hair brushes quite demanding, but I have some which are made with a slightly firmer mix which seems to suit me.
So, that's going quite well just now, and, hopefully I'll have some actual 'finished' paintings to post over the next few months. Probably of clouds.
(Note to self: Whatever brush, or paint, or pencil, is my current favourite – the really important process when drawing is Eye – Brain – Hand. In that order)
