My ink and watercolour sketch of a local fishing boat

Such a beautiful day today, so I packed up some minimal urban sketching supplies and went out to sketch …. I didn’t know what.

Boats not People today

My default destination is a local cafe to sketch people. But I wanted to do something a little different today, so I headed down to the fishing boat harbour to see if any boats inspired me.

On the dock there’s a whole row of little boats, but the angle for sketching them from the boardwalk is too distant and challenging. But then I found this lonely fishing boat all by itself at the slip.

I did a few preliminary sketches, and took some photos of different boats nearby, and then headed back to the studio to paint a version of this boat from a more interesting angle.

My Sketching Kit

I used Grey Meerkat Octopus Ink in my Twisbi Eco-T which has an EF nib. I’ve been sketching a lot with my black ink recently, and using a F nib, but I wanted to experiment with less prominent ink lines.

I was planning on using the black ink pen to add some darker lines, but the detailing was quite fine, and I didn’t want to overwhelm it, so I added a few black ink lines using my Staedtler pigment liner 0.05 which seems to have a similar line weight to the EF nib, so they’re quite balanced. The black ink add emphasis, but it’s not dominant.

What I’ll do differently next time

I’ve been focusing on trying to achieve more depth in my sketches, and this one worked out well. If there’s one thing I’d do differently, it’s that I wouldn’t have put an ink line on the top of the distant foliage.

I don’t mind the line between the sea and the foliage, but the one between the sky and the foliage doesn’t need to be there. Its omission would have helped to give this foliage a more distant feel.

But I’m just being picky!

It’s been a while since I painted a boat. I took part in Boatober last October, and had a whole month of sketching boats, and that art challenge gave me the confidence to sketch the local boats here in Cabanas. We don’t have many iconic buildings to sketch here in the village, and our local church is modern and really quite uninspiring. But it has been newly renovated and painted outside so maybe it’s time to find its good side and try and capture it from an interesting angle with my fountain pen and watercolours.