puddles in evening field, sunset

Evening Fields and Puddles, detail, coloured pencil, Vivien Blackburn

Evening Fields and Puddles, sketchbook page in A4 moleskine, coloured pencil, Vivien Blackburn

Evening Fields and Puddles, detail, coloured pencil, Vivien Blackburn

Water may be a small element in this little sketch in an A4 moleskine, but it's very important to the composition and ambience of the cold, damp evening. The puddles add to the muddy coldness of the field, they weren't reflecting the warm colours, low in the sky but the colder white/grey of the clear sky overhead.

It was a subtle sunset, not a dramatic one and this was done at home with memories and photos - coloured pencil is simply too slow (for me) for building the glazes of colour intensely enough within the very very short timeframe of the special light. With oils it would have been possible to work entirely plein air fast enough.

As I said on my blog post today on using coloured pencils, I really like the way they behave on moleskine paper, allowing lots of layering of colour - like getting the warm glow of orangey light onto the grass of the field. Also the ease of drawing back into the image with an eraser. It isn't easy to scan or photograph the softer paler washes of colour though. The pale glow in the sky is a little smoother and has more soft pale colours that aren't picked up well here.

I've decided that this year I'll be juggling 3 main themes - Local Landscape (incorporating the Waterways Project, which is a slow burner), The Coast continuing and a new project on looking at Still Life in a different way for a project with a group of friends I meet up with once a month - we never do still life, so set ourselves a challenge to each find our own angle on it, to make it interesting to us and eventually have a joint exhibition of work done.

A big society I belong to are doing a project and exhibition on War and Peace to tie in with a large exhibition of major works planned of works in the museum's collection. I often take part in these projects but this year I'm feeling that juggling 3 themes is enough and I'm probably going to give it a miss unless some linking theme to my other work occurs to me (and time is short) - any brilliant thoughts on that would be welcome! It doesn't have to be taken absolutely literally but the ideas bounced off the theme.