Ink and Wash

Since the Christmas break, I've been working on one of my many weak areas - namely applying watercolour to my urban sketches and other ink sketches. I'm a great admirer of other people's ink and wash sketches, and I've hankered after producing work of that quality for a couple of years. Without any effect, it should be said. If I show you the sort of thing I produced in my first attempts back in 2016, I'm sure you can handle it: -

This is a sketch of a sculpture called Mortal Coil in the centre of Port Talbot. It's a very long way from the kind of work I wanted to produce.

To be fair, this was made before I'd discovered the kind of ink pen I most like to use. This was sketched with biro, and even before I added the watercolour it really wasn't a very good sketch at all.

Well, I've spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of years trying to work out exactly where I'm going wrong. Part of this has involved copying some watercolour wash sketches by other artists which I really like. I'm not going to show you those - you should admire the originals, not imitation. Still, the process of doing so really helped me crystallise the process, and led me to draw a few (probably glaringly obvious to other people) conclusions: -

* The sketches I was trying to use watercolour with were too small to get the kind of results I want. So I would try to make sure that A4 would be the smallest size book I'd use from now on for a watercolour wash sketch.
* Cheap sketchbooks and paper weren't helping me at all. Actually my best results would come by using a W.H.Smiths Acrylic Paper pad.
* I was probably overdoing the ink shading, and could do more shading with the paint rather than the ink.
* I was getting far too hung up trying to exactly reproduce the colours and tones of the original, and needed to be less literal, and look at the effects I could get by combining colours with each other.
* It would help to think in terms of the areas or blocks of main colours that I wanted to use before putting brush to paper, and to work out which colours I wanted to use wet on wet, and which wet on dry. Then the idea would be to think out the order in which I would paint different areas - and which I would need to allow to dry before continuing.
* Just as important as well would be to think about the areas/buildings/figures within the sketch that I was going to leave unpainted. The idea certainly at the start was to have the colour becoming more concentrated towards the main focus within the picture.

Now, I'm sure any proper artists or sketchers reading this are probably thinking - yeah - so? That's all just common sense. Well, yes, but then that's the point. When it comes to applying watercolour, I just don't NATURALLY have any common sense. I've never really understood colours. So this process of making these wash sketches this month has been very exciting for me, because I think that I've produced some better results than I've ever produced before. And what's more, it's only a start, but I do think I've learned just a tiny bit about colours. There's more to do, and I've a long way to go, but I have to say that I think I'm a lot further than I was one month ago. See whether you agree or not. Here's a few of the line and wash sketches I've made this month: -