Category Archives: Stage 3

Exercise – Sketching an individual tree

I chose a tree by the river for this exercise, which was to do four sketches of the same tree:

Sketch 1:

In pencil, a simple outline drawing with vegetation shaded in

Sketch 2:

In coloured pencil, including some tonal shading this time

Sketch 3:

In pen with tonal shading (drawn as a continuous line), but no vegetation drawn in

Sketch 4:

Pen as with sketch 3, with vegetation in coloured pencil – a bit too luminous in colour and being able to see through the coloured pencil to the pen below looks a bit weird.

Sketch 5:

I did an additional larger sketch of the same tree in charcoal

Exercise – Larger study of an individual tree

I picked the tree on my patio to draw as I could do this comfortably through the patio windows:

I chose Letraset Tria pens to complete this sketch as I wanted to try them out.

The pens give a uniform colour no matter how much you go over the same spot with them, so I had to add tone through hatching on the trunk. There wasn’t really any way I could add this in the foliage areas though, but I don’t think the image suffers too much from this.

Exercise – Study of several trees

I found a suitable spot not too far from home which I thought might work well:

I decided to tackle this using charcoal:

I then thought I’d try adding some colour:

The chalk made an almighty mess! That and I seemed unable to get any control over them at all. So, covered in green chalk, I decided to try again.

This time I thought I’d try coloured pencil to introduce colour:

This did work better to get colour in, but looking back on these images, they are very childlike images – mainly because they are uniform in tone. The trunks were pretty uniform in tone, but I think maybe I needed to use a smoother paper to get a dense black for the trunks and then rub out the few highlights? However would be the best method, I haven’t achieved it in these drawings!

Check and Log

How many different tree types have you drawn?

• Three. The most interesting ones I find to draw are those which are dead or partially dead as the bare branches give the interest and they are not just a mass of green.

What techniques did you use to distinguish each type?

• I’m not sure I’ve developed a technique for different types of tree, I approached each drawing with a plan to use different media or just to see what worked.

What did you do to convey the mass of foliage?

• As detailed above, I mostly avoided this by drawing bare trees, and the drawings I did of several trees were not very successful.

How did you handle light on the trees? Was it successful?

• Not very well. Some of the hatching I used on the study of the individual tree worked well, but apart from that I haven’t been successful in capturing this.

Did you manage to select and simplify? Look at your drawings and make notes on how you did this, and what could you do better?

• Not really. The tree image which I think has worked best for me was the study of the individual tree in which I drew pretty much everything which was there, only simplifying in the mass of foliage. The only images which were simplified were the studies of several trees and I simplified them to the point of a child drawing! I’m quite disappointed with what I produced for the tree drawings as I was quite keen to get some good results with these. I definitely need to work on my simplification of images and on my tonal work.

Exercise – Study of a townscape using line

This exercise called for a couple of pages of preliminary drawings, then a study in pen and ink or drawing pen. By this point in the course I had left it too late to do much drawing outside as it has turned cold and wet, so I modified this assignment to do a pen sketch from a photograph.

The image chosen:

My sketch:

Some bits of this have worked quite well, but I have failed to get any sense of tone in the majority of this image.

Exercise – A sketchbook of townscape drawings

I tried this exercise drawing the two 10cm squares for a detail and tonal study:

However, when I can to the full sketch I realised I had got some of the proportions wrong (the ivy is too small). I also got too cold drawing and lost inspiration for this view.

So I tried again using a photograph of another area of Grassington:

I started this sketch on a background of light graphite rubbed into the paper, and I really like the effect this has had on the image. It also makes it quite easy to rub guide lines into the background once you no longer need them.

Exercise – A limited palette study from your sketches

Again, I had to modify this exercise as I didn’t have enough preliminary sketches and none which mentioned colour, so I worked off a photograph of Skipton high street:

I decided to work with the Letraset Tria pens and started out trying to complete it just using diaganol lines in one direction:

I didn’t get on with this though, so abandoned that idea and started again:

I rushed into this drawing too quickly though and didn’t get all the main angles worked out before starting to draw, so I only completed part of the drawing. Problems include:

• The people are too small in the distance to the right of the car
• Shop fronts too high (in taking out the cars parked in front of them, I have miss-judged the pavement level)
• Background building wrong shape (in taking out the tree, I have got the shape of this wrong)
• I drew the building lines in too far down before adding the car

If I get chance later in the course I might re-try this exercise.

Exercise – Drawing statues

I never realised how few statues I have near me until I went looking for them! However, I did find 3 in my nearest town and had to make do with them.

The first one I attempted was a statue of Freddie Truman in the canal basin:

Using pencil, I made the following sketch:

On a different day I tried to tackle the other two statues. First off was the angle on top of the war memorial. There was only one location in which I could sit and sketch this, which wasn’t the ideal profile:

I was also a fair distance from the statue (I zoomed in to photograph it), so I went for capturing the general outline rather than including any of the detail as I couldn’t really see it from where I was.

My first attempt in charcoal:

The statue here was very roughly sketched and the background too bland, so I had another go, this time using softer charcoal and attempting to capture some of the cloud formations:

Outlining the pillar on which the statue stands was a mistake, but I was quite pleased with the rest of the image.

The final statue was on the high street:

There was nowhere to sit nearby to be able to sketch this statue, so I had to do my drawing at home, choosing pencil for this one:

The pigeon didn’t work brilliantly on this, and his right hand went a bit funny, but I like the looming impression he gives.

Check and Log

How did you use a limited colour palette to create a sense of depth?

• Only through the use of perspective and some shading with the black pen. The Tria pens don not allow for different tones.

Did your preliminary sketches give you enough information for your final pieces of work?

• I didn’t manage to do any sketches from preliminary sketches due to the weather turning and needing to progress with the course. If I get chance later in the course I will re-visit this exercise.

Would you approach this task differently another time?

• I think it is important to use rulers and get the main perspective shapes sketched in before starting drawing in earnest. I did this best on the image with a background of graphite and this is the one which has worked the best.

Have you got the scale of the buildings right? Make notes on what worked and what didn’t.

• When I got the perspective right then yes. I struggled when trying to exclude things (e.g. the cars in the limited colour palette sketch).

Have you captured the colour and atmosphere in your studies? How did you do this?

• I have worked mainly in pencil with these sketches, the only colour study being the limited palette sketch, which I think best captures the atmosphere as well. The drawing I am most pleased with is the one on the graphite background, but this does have a different atmosphere than the image it was taken from, as the drawing is much more moody.

Despite the lack of post recently, I have by no means stalled again, I have just been working on many different sections of the course at once and am only just completing some of them! Hopefully I should be posting quite a lot in the next few days.

Exercise – Parallel perspective – an interior view

I chose a view from my lounge into the dining room as this was the only place I could sit and view through a doorway. We don’t have any tiled walls/floors or any rugs, so I used a coffee table instead:

My initial sketch:

Although a few of the chairs in the dining room were not right, I was reasonably happy with the lines drawn in this sketch. Adding in the eye level line and extending the lines to meet this gave the following:

Here I can see that there were a number of places where I went wrong in my sketch, mainly the size of the far edge of the table, the bottom edge of the right hand door (obvious once I had drawn the line in), and the lower half of the door on the left.

Getting these lines in at the start of drawing an image is obviously key to getting the perspective correct.

Exercise – Angular perspective

I chose a view at the top of Grassington for this exercise:

My sketch:

I didn’t spend quite as long as I wanted to on this sketch due to falling light levels and it being very cold – the drawbacks of not keeping to target on my assignments has meant that the weather is going to be against me from now on!

I could tell straight away that I had got something wrong as the nearest roof should have been showing if I had got the angles correct, so I had obviously got something wrong.

Adding in the eye level and perspective lines:

It took me a while to work out what was wrong with this drawing as most of the lines did actually meet at the vanishing points, but the roof should have been showing on the building in the foreground if it was correct. It was only when I added the vanishing points to the photograph that I realised that my horizon level line was too high on my sketch which was why I wasn’t getting it right.

It is definitely worth taking a ruler out with me and sketching in the horizon line and vanishing points until I have got better at doing these drawings.

Check and Log

What problems did you find in executing perspective drawings?

• I needed to learn to measure the angle of every line (and not trust my brain’s expectation of where the lines should go).

Make notes on the merits of using, or not using, rulers to guide you.

• Getting the perspective lines correct without a ruler is very tricky, and until I’ve done a lot of these sketches, I think will be essential, if only to get the start and end points of lines drawn in. I didn’t use them for either of these drawings, but did for one of later townscape images and for the assignment drawing, and they make a lot of difference.
• Rulers can’t always be used if the vanishing point is a long way off the paper, but where they can be used I think I will be using them.
• The other disadvantage of using rulers is the very straight and precise lines they give, which will contrast to the other lines used, so I found that the ruled lines needed to be light and then gone over afterwards to give a more “natural” line.
• They are rather unwieldy and difficult to use when just out sketching with a pad.
• They also may be using the more technical left hemisphere of the brain, whilst the right hemisphere will be needed for completing the drawing?

Research Point

Brief History of Landscape in Art

To understand different artists’ depictions of landscape, I think I need to start by researching the history of landscape painting.

Roots

The appearance of landscape as a subject for art appears to start in Greek and Roman times, when images of landscapes and gardens were painted on villa walls. However, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the depiction of pure landscape seems to have stopped, consigned to the background when depicting portraits or religious scenes.

It was not until the Renaissance period that landscapes were once again depicted in their own right, although it appears that it was mainly in the Netherlands where it was considered a worthy subject.

Albrecht Dürer

1471 to 1528

Dürer is becoming a common theme in this course, so I won’t bother looking into his history again.

On the subject of his landscapes, he is acknowledged as one of the first European landscape artists, with his watercolour work in particular showing his skill in depicting nature.

I have picked out four of his images here:

Fortified Castle

A very flat looking watercolour image of a fortified castle, which is all on one plane having no foreground or background to give it depth

Landscape with a woodland pool

This image is acknowledged as one of Durer’s most sensitive portrayals of nature (British museum). It is always difficult to scrutinise a picture very well when viewing it on a computer screen rather than in the flesh, but this also seems to be a flat image. The pool all appears to be the same from front to back and so doesn’t appear to recede into the distance. There also appears to be a uniformity of detail across the image.

The Feast of the Rose Garlands

Not a landscape image in its own right, but it does show the use of landscape in the background which would be the more common way landscape was depicted in his era. Again it is hard to see very clearly, but it does look like there might be some aerial perspective in the mountains in the far background. Certainly the blue colours give some feeling of depth, although the rest of the image all appears to be a single flat plane.

The Flight into Egypt

Another image with landscape as a setting, but one which shows some incredible detail in the depiction of the land. Again, this image shows a uniformity of line and detail across the image.

17^th Century

This was when the ‘classical’ landscape was born, whose aim was “to illustrate an ideal landscape recalling Arcadia, a legendary place in ancient Greece known for its quiet pastoral beauty” (Getty). The aim was to provide an image of perfection, rather than a depiction of reality.

Nicolas Poussin

1594 – 1665

Poussin’s work often carries a moral or philosophical message (Met museum), often depicting religious scenes of various faiths. Because of this, the majority of his paintings appear to contain people and be telling a story about them.

The four images I have picked below are some where people play a smaller part:

Spring, or The Garden of Eden

There appears to be some depth to this image, although the majority of the image is on the same plane. Adam and Eve are very centrally placed, but the line from the figures, along the edge of the trees up to god on his cloud, does give quite a strong diagonal line.

An Italianate wooded landscape with figures resting on a path and a town beyond

The track in the foreground leads nicely into this image, although again it does seem to be a mostly single plane image, with just a bit of aerial perspective to the left hand side where the landscape disappears off into the distance.

A Roman Road

A great example of single point perspective

Ancient arch with papal crest and Italian landscape

The only image of his that I could find with no people featured at all. I like this sketchy style, although there could be more of a tonal range in the background.

18^th Century

In the 18^th century, landscape finally achieved a recognisable status as a worthy subject for art across Europe. The ‘Grand Tour’ was popular with many rich people, with Italy being popular with many landscape artists. In France, the ‘classical’ landscape was expanded by Watteau to include people enjoying the countryside.

Jean Antoine Watteau

1684–1721

Watteau’s paintings mainly feature aristocratic people enjoying the landscape, although not in a way intended to tell a story as those painted by Poussin were.

Amusements Champetres

This image shows great skill and detail, although the child on the right hand side does not seem to be in proportion to the other figures in the picture.

Fete in a Park

The people seem to glow in this image and don’t seem to be real. They also look as if they have been painted onto the landscape afterwards.

The Shepherds

I think Watteau had a distorted view of what shepherds looked like and did all day! Again, some of the figures don’t appear to be correct in their perspective, with the woman further back on the swing appearing to be the same size as the woman in the foreground.

The Spring: Fete Champetre in a Water Garden with Figures in a Boat

It could just be me, but the perspective doesn’t seem to be quite right to me in this image. The lines all lead off to the right, but don’t seem to converge at the same point?

19^th Century

The Industrial Revolution altered perceptions of the outdoors and started a trend of ‘plein air’ (or outdoor) painting, depicting real life landscapes rather than the idealized ‘clasical’ views.

The birth of photography then changed landscape again, as artists then had to move away from faithful depiction of the scene, to a greater freedom of expression, into Impressionism.

Gustave Courbet

1819–1877

Courbet definitely shows a move to a more realistic depiction of landscapes with the following three images:

Landscape near Ornans

Again, this looks a bit flat to me, but given that is becoming a theme in my assessments of these pictures, it could well be as a result of viewing these images on screen.

The Pont de Nahin at Ornans

This shows aerial perspective in the distance, but the foreground looks like it might not have been completed?

The Sea-Arch at Etretat

This seems to show the most depth out of the three images.

In Courbet’s seascapes, he moves from realism to portrayal of the mood in this image:

Lake Leman with Setting Sun

20^th Century

Urban landscapes feature more often, as well as the plight of the countryside from industrialisation. In terms of styles, anything goes!

L.S. Lowry

1887–1976

Lowry went to Art School when he was 15 and was still attending art classes 15 years later. In the 1920s he worked as a rent collector which exposed him to the industrial scenes for which he is famous for painting.

His paintings started as quick sketches on the spot and were developed later at home. They are very distinctive images, often showing masses of people walking the streets with an industrial scene in the background, showing the effect of industrialisation on the world.

The first two images I looked at are “classic” Lowry oil paintings of lots of people in front of industrial buildings belching smoke. They use a very simple colour palette, fading the colours in the background, and make good use of the white of the background. Overall they have great energy and you could spend hours exploring different areas of the images:

After a Fire

At the Mill Gate

I also picked out a couple of images which were different from what I associate as a Lowry image:

Waiting Room, Ancoats Hospital, Salford

This still has Lowry’s distinctive style, but the image is much more sketchy and quick. Presumably this is one of his on the spot sketches which would be taken to work up to a painting in the future. It is impressive how he can record so much of the scene in so few marks on the paper.

Street in Maryport

This shows single point perspective (but in a curvy way), with subtle colouring giving a very simple and clean image.

Sources:

The Museum Network: http://www.museumnetworkuk.org/landscapes/history/historyindex.htm

The J.Paul Getty Museum: http://www.getty.edu/education/teachers/classroom_resources/curricula/landscapes/background1.html

Musée d’Orsay: http://www.musee-orsay.fr/fileadmin/mediatheque/integration_MO/PDF/Landscape.pdf

Bridgeman Education: http://www.bridgemaneducation.com/

British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/a/albrecht_d%C3%BCrer,_landscape-1.aspx

Albrecht-Durer.org: http://www.albrecht-durer.org/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org

The Lowry: http://www.thelowry.com

Tate: http://www.tate.org.uk

Exercise – A sketchbook walk

The weather was good for these sketches, although midges were a problem which meant I didn’t sit around for too long to do them.

Overall I found it tricky to depict both the water, and the mass of tree foliage, both of which feature in most of these images.

Sketch walk 1 – first image which didn’t go very well

Sketch walk 2 – better proportioned image

Sketch walk 3 – didn’t get any detail into the foreground

Sketch walk 4 – too similar tone across the image

I didn’t make any of the notes requested by the exercise, so tried another go, this time working in drawing pens as well as pencils (and avoiding water!):

Sketch walk 5 – I like the way I did the trees in this image, although outlining the different types of ground in pen has given too defined a boundary to these areas

Sketch walk 6 – I rushed this image to escape from the midges and failed to get any good tonal range

Sketch walk 7 – working in just pen, I have achieved even less tonal range in this image!

Sketch walk 8 – another quick sketch, this time cut short because it was too uncomfortable a position to sit in (stool now on order!)

I failed to make notes again, so will try to remember to do this in the next exercise instead.

Looking back at these drawings after my tutors comments on my last assignment I can see that I am still failing to get the light and dark tones from the pencils and they are all a fairly uniform line and tone. I will try to consciously work on this in the next exercises.

Exercise – 360^o Studies

I found it hard to identify a location which would be suitable for a 360^o study as there always seemed to be a lack of interest in at least one direction. Maybe it was just a reason to procrastinate though which I seem to be very good at with this course, so I set out on a walk determined to find a location and complete the sketches.

I didn’t take a compass with me, so just rotated 90 degrees for each sketch. Unfortunately I forgot to take a camera out with me on this occasion to record the views.

Sketch 1:

I was planning to pay more attention to tone in this image and started to do this, but ran out of time in the 15 minute ‘window’.

Sketch 2:

I changed to charcoal in the hope of drawing more quickly. I still ran out of time though!

Sketch 3:

Again working in charcoal, I managed to complete the sketch this time. I like the trees and using the putty rubber on the sky worked reasonably well, but the foreground lines didn’t work out quite so well.

Sketch 4:

For the least inspiring view of the four, I changed to Tria Letraset pens, but again ran out of time and didn’t complete the sketch.

Research Point

Landscape Series

Artists working in series

Oscar-Claude Monet

1840 to 1926

Monet is famous for his close observation of the variation in colour and light throughout the days and months. This was achieved through “series” painting, where the same subject was depicted throughout the day and in a variety of different conditions by painting a number of canvases at once. This meant that Monet could work on the canvas which most closely resembled the conditions at any point during the day. The Haystack series for instance, resulted in a series of 25 paintings painted from the end of one summer to the following spring. For an artist who worked mostly ‘plein air’, this approach must have been essential to be able to continue to work when the conditions changed. It must however have been difficult to transport all the canvases around and to know at what point to stop work on one of them and start on another.

Haystacks at Giverny

Haystacks

Haystacks, Pink and Blue Impressions

Grainstack (Sunset)

Camille Pissarro

1830 to 1903

Near the end of his life, Pissarro painted city views from hotel or apartment windows. The images below are all of the Boulevard Montmartre at different times of the day and seasons, in a similar series painting to Monet. He completed 14 paintings in this series.

Boulevard Montmartre, Spring

Boulevard Montmartre

Boulevard Montmartre on a Foggy Sunny Morning

The Boulevard Montmartre at Night

Using a hotel or apartment to complete these painting must have been easier logistically than Monet’s ‘plein air’ series paintings, although the inclusion of people and carriages must have added a different complication in the capturing of these within a short space of time.

Sources:

Bio: http://www.biography.com

Bridgeman Education: http://www.bridgemaneducation.com/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org

The National Gallery: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

National Gallery of Australia: http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/turnertomonet/Detail.cfm?IRN=4701

Exercise – Drawing cloud formations

Small sketches of cloud formations in monochrome and colour.

My initial attempts at clouds were terrible!

On a cloudless day, I resorted to my image library. Changing medium to oil pastels, I produced another child like drawing of clouds!

A slightly improved version came next:

Changing image produced a reasonable likeness of the clouds:

Not quite as successful was a sunset image:

The same image in coloursoft pencils worked better:

A different image again, in chalk this time which I think worked quite well:

Finally another image in charcoal, drawn mainly with a putty rubber which gave a very moody image:

Exercise – Plotting space through composition and structure

A3 cartridge paper, drawing from a photograph.

The photograph I chose to draw from was this view of Ingleborough from Moughton Scar:

I divided up the image into Foreground, middle-ground and background like this:

I decided to use Inktense pencils for this exercise. For the background I sketched in the colours and painted them with water to give flat areas of colour. I did the same for the middle ground, but then used dry pencils to add some tone and texture. For the foreground, I used masking fluid to keep selected areas white, painted some flat areas of colour and then used the pencils when the paper was wet to give brighter and denser colours, finally adding some more detail and texture with dry pencils.

Research Point

Write notes on how these artists divide their landscape into foreground, middle ground and background.

Claude Lorrain

1600 to 1682

Lorrain painted idealized landscapes, where everything is perfect and beautiful. His images have an incredible brightness to them and I love the strong lighting in the images where the sun is rising or setting over the sea. He divides his images into a detailed and bright foreground, often with the foreground features framing the image, the middle ground where the colours are more muted and there is less detail, then the background with very muted colours and hardly any detail.

Aeneas and Dido in Carthage

Morning at the Port

Pastoral Landscape

Sea Port at Sunset

Joseph Mallord William Turner

1775 to 1851

Turner is considered to be one of the greatest masters of watercolour landscape painting, although he also worked in other mediums. He was known as “the painter of light” due to his use of bright colours in his paintings.

Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire

This image is very reminiscent of Lorrain, although the foreground colours are not as bold and bright, and the transition between the foreground, middle ground and background is more gradual.

Modern Italy – The Pifferari

Scarborough

Venice: Grand Canal with Santa Maria della Salute

These all show a similar representation of the foreground, middle ground and background, with the colours becoming more muted and the amount of detail decreasing.

Sources:

Artble: http://www.artble.com/artists/claude_lorrain

Claudelorrain.org: http://www.claudelorrain.org/

Bridgeman Education: http://www.bridgemaneducation.com/

National Gallery: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Tate: http://www.tate.org.uk

Check and Log

In what way did you simplify and select in your study? Were you able to focus on simple shapes and patterns amid all the visual information available to you?

• I simplified the background by just using washes of flat colours, and for the grasses in the foreground I concentrated on the texture and colour rather than a detailed representation. Other than that it was actually quite a simple image I chose which I didn’t need to simplify much.

How did you create a sense of distance and form in your sketches?

• I used decreasing levels of detail and tone to create the sense of distance. I think this worked between the foreground and the middle ground, but I don’t think the middle ground was quite as successful.

How did you use light and shade? Was it successful?

• It was moderately successful. I think it worked in some areas of the foreground, but there actually wasn’t that much shade in the image I chose.

What additional preliminary work would have been helpful toward the larger study?

• I can’t think of any more preliminary work which would have been useful for this image, other that gaining greater skills in the use of the pencils to achieve the colours and textures I was aiming for.