What with the 30x30 direct watercolour challenge 2022, it’s been a little while since I made any ink sketches. Last night there was a sketch meet in Mumbles. That’s the other side of Swansea and must be a good dozen or so miles from home. The idea was to take advantage of the light evenings, and it just so happened that yesterday was bathed in glorious sunshine. There were just three of us who met, but that was fine. I hadn’t met either of the others before, but I’ve known one of them, David, on the internet for a few years, and admired his sketches of Swansea and the local area.
Okay, so if you’ve never taken part in a sketch meet, or a
sketch crawl before, here’s how it works. You start off meeting at a particular
location at a pre-arranged time. You agree together when you’re going to meet
up, and then you go off on your separate ways to sketch, well, whatever takes
your fancy in the locality, really. I made three sketches in an hour and a
half, which is pretty much lightning fast for me nowadays.
I suspect that for most people, the meeting up at the end
and sharing your work and chatting is the highlight of any sketch meet. It
certainly is for me. And when we did meet up last night, I surprised myself
with something which just slipped out. The others had both used watercolour – bloody
well too if you want my opinion. I forewent the opportunity for direct
watercolour urban sketching, and just used pen. Feeling I should say something
by way of an apology I explained that I was doing the 30x30 direct watercolour
challenge, and so felt watercoloured out. Then this came out,
“I feel I struggle with colour in general. I know who I am
as an ink sketcher, but I don’t know who I am as a watercolour painter.”
Written on the page like this it sounds pretentious. But it really wasn’t meant
that way. As an ink sketcher, I do know who I am. I know what I can do, and
when I look at something I want to draw in ink I know how I am going to
approach it. Usually, what I end up with looks pretty much the way that I
intended when I started. This doesn’t mean I can’t get better, and it doesn’t
mean I can’t ever try something different with it. What it means is, the core
of what makes me whatever I am as an ink sketcher is set, and that’s not going
to change.
It’s not the same for me with paint. Even on a bad day I
feel competent as an ink sketcher. Even on a good day I rarely feel competent
as a painter. That’s something I’m learning to live with. And the ironic thing
is that the more I accept my limitations and start to enjoy watercolour painting
just for the fun of doing it, the better my watercolour painting becomes. It’s
not just me who sees an improvement between what I produced in the 30x30
challenge in 2021 and what I’m producing this year. If we take my favourite so
far this year, the Swansea Mumbles tram, it isn’t just that it’s so much better
than what I produced last year. It’s that it’s so much better than pretty much
any watercolour I’ve painted – even when I’ve sketched the design out first in
pencil. Within a day of me putting it up for auction, I already had an offer to
buy it.
So here we are, with 8 days left in the month and 6 paintings left to produce. Now, I could just dash off some quite simple things and
even if they were total rubbish, taking the 30 pictures as a whole they would
still exceed 2021’s in quality, if not in terms of monetary value. Well, be
fair, I did have that extravagant tube station commission last year.
So - number 24. This is an illustrative piece of Scottish folk hero Rob Roy Macgregor.
No comments:
Post a Comment