Singapore Boats

Singapore Boats
(23" x 17") coloured pencils on black Canson Mi Teintes
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Sometimes you have an image which takes quite some time to come to fruition. This is the tale of one such image.

Back in 1987 I went to Singapore for the overseas field trip for my MBA so we could find out how business works in a completely different environment to the UK.

I wasn't even drawing at the time. My art had been left behind at school a long time ago and doing a 'full-on' MBA part-time at the London Business School at same time as holding down a management job meant virtually all my 'spare' time was accounted for. I remember I actually qualified for an NUS card as a full time student because of the number of contact hours we managed each month in School!

However on one evening we went down to the harbour and I saw the fishing boats at dusk. Something about them made me take a photograph. When I got the photographs back, it looked like a painting. I was amazed. I'd not really taken 'arty' photos before and I was very struck by the strength of the image - particularly of the boats in the foreground. However it got filed away along with the rest of my MBA studies and I got on with what was now a senior management job!


Some time later, I decided to try my art again as a completely different activity which would balance out the type of job I was doing at the time - artistic instead of numerical, solitary and peaceful instead of a regular round of meetings. It worked and that's when I started to get back into my art - starting with watercolour.

I subsequently realised that I really enjoyed drawing and in the early 90s started using coloured pencils again. Then joined an art forum in the middle of the last decade.

Eighteen years later I finally got round to drawing the boats. I'd had them in my head for a long time and went searching for them while I was leading a project about drawing water.

Now you've heard the back story, here's the whole sequence of images of how this drawing came about - plus an explanation of what I said back in 2005 when I did it.

Probably the most important thing I did was crop the photo so I started with something manageable from my perspective - the large photo is nice but I'd be doing boats forever as opposed to the water.

Next I printed off a colour print of the cropped photo onto A4 matte photo paper and a greyscale onto plain paper. I then gridded the greyscale and the black Canson into thirds. This is really just a guide for me - I eyeballed the drawing from there using a celadon green (background colour of the water) - not being too precious about super accuracy but enough that the boats don't look too silly and I'm keeping the proportions on the page which I designed into the crop.

This is a slightly smaller version of the image as I got my initial scans wrong and couldn't be bothered to do them again - so there's a bit more at both the top and bottom!

So far as the boats are concerned I'm only focusing on the big shapes at this stage - detail is not allowed until a lot further on when the decision gets made as to which bits get the detail. So there's a nod in the direction of tyres around the boat - but they're not carefully drawn nor will they be for the time being.

Then I started to get a layer down all over the area of water. I started by finding the right colour for the reflections of the boats and then worked on the lighter areas. Bear in mind I'm really scouring the photo for slight changes in colour and looking hard for what the colours are. There's a ton of hues between very dark green (which hasn't made an appearance yet) moving through beep blue greens and mid greens and sky blue and yellow greens through to an awful lot of tints of grey green and just a smidgen of white. (Do you want to know the colours?) I worked colours from both into the boats as I went to help the unity of the painting.

I'm working quite hard at this stage in getting the shape of both the reflections and the negative shapes inbetween them right - as in my experience this is what gives the painting the feeling that the water is 'real'. I'm also working over the edges of the reflections a bit so they don't get too hard (but without losing sight of the underlying shape) - they should be a tad blurry at this stage. I decide where to go for hard edges later.

I'm using the pencils on their side and cover vast amounts of paper really fast this way - plus it stops me being too pernickety about it and helps to merge colours in a pleasing way. I'm not too fussed about which direction I'm doing this in but broadly speaking it's a lateral movement. They're basically quite light layers - I'm not pressing hard at all.

I picked out a few colours to start the boats off - one or two brights hatched onto boat roofs and tarpaulins in the background (as generally this is going to be quite muted and I wanted to see what the brights looked like) plus I wanted to try and find the right colour for the weather beaten wood

Subsequently I included the drawing in a portfolio of work for admission to an art society and worked on it some more to get to the drawing at the top. I do remember adding in a tiny bit more red on the boats. Unfortunately I have to tell you that coloured pencils have an unhappy habit of sinking into black Canson paper over time so although this looked good at the time it had to be 'rescued' to produce the image at the top of the post for the portfolio.

I daren't look at it one more time.......the boats may have sunk yet again!

online sketching and using photoshop

Sketches/doodles done online here Vivien Blackburn

Julie posting a link to this fabulous time-eating site - sketching with the tools is so fluid and the marks it makes delicious! Click to see it larger and you'll see what I mean. I did this quick sketch from memories of walking through the dunes and down to the sand on the Norfolk coast. (I must get over there with Spring on its way) I used the shading, chrome, ribbon and long fur tools in this.

then combined with colour on my computer .....

making it more wintry

I could play for hours! I'd love this as a proper programme, actually on my computer, that would produce large scale drawings.


It's really worth clicking on them to see the lovely marks it makes properly. And play have a go ..........


oh dear .... Julie this is addictive

Where Queen Matilda fell in

Old Ford Lock, River Lea, East London
7.5" x 7.5" coloured pencils on Arches HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

The title of this post references that the story that in 1110, Queen Matilda, wife of King Henry I, fell while crossing the ford while on her way to to Barking Abbey - more or less at this spot.

I developed this drawing from a sketch which I did last year and it was part of my 'backwaters' contribution to the recent Alleyways and Waterways of London exhibition at the Barbican. I'm not quite sure why but this image seems a bit indistinct and the original is now behind glass which is not the best place for getting another scan!

I've drawn and redrawn this about four times so far and this is just the latest version. I think Constable may have got in on the act as I was reading about him while doing the drawing!

Anyway, having looked at it hanging in the exhibition - which I find always provides me with a fresh perspective on a piece - I'm sure there's a better drawing in there somewhere but I'm not quite sure what I need to change to bring it about.

This was the original sketch in my sketchbook blog post Old Ford Lock - and some ancient tales.

Old Ford Lock, River Lea, East London
8.5" x 11.5", pencil and coloured pencils
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Starting new, looking at the old!

As part of the new year, like many of us, I've been having a tidy up and a clear out. Mainly looking for work for my new year sale. Under my bed (yes, as cliche as that sounds!) I found a very old portfolio of sketches and drawings. It's always fun to look back at what you did before and this portfolio is specifically a selection of works for me to keep - a sort of archive of different time periods and styles.

And in it I found two sample books of pastel paper with sketches in, one was figure drawings but the other was sketches I did in a local park. I used to go out (it was a block behind the studio) and do sketches of the flowers, shrubs, or the pond. So these were a few studies of the water surface and reflections and ripples. (These are about 6-7" square each.)





What I love is how well pastel can be used to do studies like these. They let you imitate the short patches of light and colour, rather like the impressionists did with paint. But at the same time you can be quick and sketchy and try to capture directions and line of the way the water is moving, or where the light is coming from.

For 2010 I've joined a Flickr group for sketching (75 Ways to Draw More), these found sketches remind me to go out with the pastels as much as I use a pencil or marker too! And with the studio next to the river I could really have fun with more water drawings like this. Continually going back to basics should be a firm studio practice. In 2010 I just need to follow my own advice!

My other resolution is to get back to posting on Watermarks more often!

Back to the waterways project, doodling

Frog Island Factories, Vivien Blackburn

I've been playing with a new sketchbook that has brown wrapping paper pages - there's something really nice about brown wrapping paper! (even if the paper in this book is very thin)

This is from a plein air sketch done some time ago and was intended to be done simply in a range of browns. The Lyra skintones set has a gorgeous range that goes from soft apricots, through mauvey browns to siennas and umbers. I combined these with a brown Pitt pen.

As it developed I decided to add a touch of icy blue in the sky, canal and touches of it reflecting in the corrugated factory rooftops. I like the coldness, cooling down the warmth of all that brown.

It may be worth developing this as a painting, looser but with a limited colour range like this?

Old slate quarries, water, reflections and woods

update on the waterways project: Vivien

I've been looking at those old flooded slate quarries and the reflections in the water. We've had some lovely spring weather and the sky was a vivid blue so the water was too :>)

3 of these are of the little quarry near Swithland Woods. It's on private land so it's impossible to get different viewpoints. The reeds and tangled branches against the blue water are Groby Pool, a much larger ex-slate-quarry that has been dammed and is a lovely wild life reserve.

I'm really enjoying these and with the warmer weather hope to get out and do more sketching as soon as possible.

The coloured pencil one is too 'tight' I prefer the watercolour and I'm planning a 40 inch square canvas of those calligraphic reeds and branches against the rippling blue water of Groby Pool.

I've just come back, exhausted, from a very good exhibition of watercolours at the Mall Galleries in London - well worth visiting, with some lovely inspirational pieces. Also some naff ones and good paintings spoilt by truly AWFUL framing but lots of interesting stuff in a very diverse range of styles and concepts.

Charnwood Forest

carbon pencil sketch, detail, Vivien Blackburn

This is a detail of a sketch of that flooded quarry shown in my last post - you can see the whole sketch here

Carbon pencil isn't something I use very often as it isn't easy to get soft greys. This image called for intense blacks though and it worked quite well. I don't know what I've done with my little battery operated eraser so none of the drawing is done by drawing back into the darks with an eraser - my normal way of working.

Because the water level is high (it's very deep) and the rocks off to the left were in shadow, it wasn't possible to see any detail in the rocks. I concentrated on the reflections, tangled patterns and the assymetric arrangement of lights and darks .

It's on a rich cream cartridge paper (A4) that's very hard to scan and colour match.

I like cream paper to draw on - it isn't as stark as white - how about you?

Basics

These past 2 months passed without me touching a brush or drawing tool, except for a weak attempt at a sketch on a hike here and there.
The first three sketches were done on different days on different hikes;

...a walk in the coutryside of Esvres where we crossed the roman bridge which was apparently crossed by Jean d'Arc in 1429 to get across the Echandon valley...
...sketching the photographer while he was executing his professional tricks...

...and lastly a lake at the Beaufoux estate with its calm waters and willows, the boats waiting patiently for summer to erupt...

I wanted to show up here with a beautiful watery painting of something watery, but helas, I am showing up instead with my process of relearning. My well intentioned painting resembles something of the French revolution on gray and busy guillotine days, so I hid it safely from the public eye.

While staring at my attempt, my professor of first year graphics, entered my somewhat desperate thoughts. He told me years ago that I couldn't draw. Our work was all put up on the board at the end of a day for critic and when he came to my "driftwood and key" still life, he was very silent. Then he turned to me and said abruptly that I can't draw and need to do 100 more drawings, on top of the already 100 drawings we all had to do. The tools were simply to be cheap white paper and any tool except the normal pencil or graphite or charcoal or brush, like ear buds, cottonwool, sticks, pins, needles, toothbrushes, etc, along with cheap black ink. We had to really dig in with the ink and get our hands dirty and draw, draw and draw. Not be fancy or pretty or dainty or finicky, but convey our subject/object on our paper by various marks, shapes, values. It was invaluable teaching, al those hours of drawing, which admittedly, I sometimes(more than sometimes!) did with heavy sighing and stubborn shoulders.

This morning I took my professor in my head along to the river. Cheap drawing paper. Cheap ink. My chair. I sought out a spot down stream with several interesting views. Gathered some sticks, stones, leaves, bundles of grass which served as my painting tools. The first attempt was still stiff and careful but by the third drawing I started loosening up and just focused on marks on the paper. The rocks in the water started losing their name and became dark shapes, the water ripples became squigly lines, the trees became thick lines and featherings, the grass became patches...

Hopefully the ice is now broken so I can provide a real painting next time!
But for now;

...the corner of the river where I painted..

...a shot on the tools and materials...

...and three of the many efforts from this morning...