Urban Sketch of a local washing line
I walked back from Conceição to Cabanas on my way back from an appointment, and passed quite a few lines of laundry wafting in the wind. Spring feels like it might just have arrived.
I like the simplicity of this last line of clothes , so I got my sketchbook out and stood outside this house to draw it with loose ink lines, with the intention of painting it at home.
Yesterday I did an expressive watercolour sketch of a woman at the train station using Toni Burt‘s lively sketching style as an inspiration. And since then I’ve been thinking how I can experiment with the style on different subjects, to see what elements from her approach to loose sketching I may want to adapt and adopt.
Toni Burk’s Loose Watercolour Class Overview
I did Toni’s Capturing Charm and Character online class on Ivy Newport (the proof that Facebook Advertising does sometimes work!), and her approach to sketching in this tutorial is to use:
- simplified loose Ink Lines with a fine liner
- using a minimal colour palette to add loose watercolour to a few areas of the sketch (no colouring within the lines here) using an addition and subtraction approach (adding paint, dabbing it off in places and then adding more)
- adding a monochromatic shade of grey to areas of shadow
- letting the watercolours merge and mingle
- adding some splashes of paint
- adding titanium white to areas of paint that is still wet/damp so it spreads and bleeds
- adding shadow highlights with a fountain pen with water soluble ink
- using a wet brush to activate the ink to bleed
- add more splashes, additional colour, and shadow areas as needed
Toni’s approach is loose and messy, and oh-so effective. I really like the look of it, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable creating that level of messiness and wild abandon with every sketch.
By nature, I’m a much more precise and measured sketcher, but I want to loosen up more – that’s been my goal since I first started sketching – so this exploration into Toni’s style is to help me determine what level of messiness I’m comfortable with adopting, that still feels natural to me.
Using my Loose Ink Sketches to Experiment with Loose Watercolour
I thought a good approach would be to do a series of loose ink sketches that don’t take me long to create, and use them to practice Toni’s techniques for adding shadows and colour, and applying loose watercolour.
Loose Building Urban Sketch
My first attempt today was this building I sketched at the start of my walk from Conceição, it was actually the front of the house we viewed when we were house-hunting years ago. My intention was to make the tiled roof the focal point, but I ended creating a complete mess. I suppose it was too much to ask to create masterpieces straight out of the gate!
But creating mistakes isn’t a waste of time. It’s a good opportunity to put your evaluation skills to the test and assess what hasn’t worked and how to do it differently next time.
Assessment of problems with my Loose Building Sketch
The main overall critique for this sketch is that I used too many colours and the focal point isn’t evident.
- This sketch would have worked better with as a monochromatic sketch with good application of shadow areas, and a spot colour for the roof areas, and a second accent colour in the sky to add a secondary level of interest.
- I sketched to the bottom of the page, and it would have been better to end the sketch higher up to leave more of a border of white around the whole image.
With that assessment in mind, I started painting my washing line scene, which turned out a lot better, and lot less of a mess. It’s still a bit too messy for my liking, but this sketch gives me some insight into what I like and what I don’t like, what I can try to adding, and what I want to take away.
What I liked about my Washing Line Urban Sketch
Loose Ink Lines
If you’re going to use loose ink lines, I think it’s essential that your watercolour application compliments that style, and you need to paint loosely as well. If you sketch loose lines, but paint within them all tidily and neat, it looks like mismatched marriage of styles.
I’m comfortable with my use of loose ink lines in this sketch. I used to feel that I needed to force wobbly lines, and that didn’t feel natural. But by holding my pen further up the barrel away from the nib means that you can’t help but create wobbly lines, and that feels more organic. Toni used a waterproof fine liner, but I used my new Twisbi Vac700 with waterproof ink.
Paint Colours and Application
I like the coordinating colours I used for the tee-shirts which I wanted to be the focal point in this sketch, and I like the layered approach to applying the watercolour on these four shirts. I think they look interesting and dynamic, and an effective focal point.
I like the colour green I created out of the yellow I used on the shirts, so that it complements them. But because I have four areas where I used green (door, window, and plants), those areas detract from the tee-shirts and create a really busy scene. It would have been better to have these in a pale grey so they didn’t compete with the dark grey of the shadows, or the coloured shirts.
I like the muted neutral tone I used to add texture to the wall and floor. But overall the sketch feels a bit too messy for my liking.
Use of Shadows
What I liked about the scene was the dark shadows on the floor cast by the washing on the line. The sketch would have had a greater feeling of depth if the main focus was the foreground elements of the coloured shirts on the line and the dark shadows they cast, and everything else behind the washing was in muted monochromatic tones.
I used Toni’s approach of adding some soluble ink to the left side of the shirts, and then activated the bleed with water to give the shirts a feeling of depth and angling away from the light. I don’t have a fountain pen with non-waterproof ink, so I used a dark grey Tombow brush pen, and activated that instead. Using a Tombow instead of fountain pen ink allows for a more gradual and gentle addition of shadow areas, ideal for when you’re in an experimentation mode.
ADDENDUM: Extra Washing Line Sketch
I wanted to put my suggested improvements to the test to see if I could get a great feeling of depth and a more prominent focal point. So I went out to find about washing line to sketch.
This sketch works a lot better. There’s a clear focal point (the clothes on the line) and even though there’s a bike, lamp post and an TV dish, the focal point doesn’t get overwhelmed within this busy scene. I really had to think about how to craft this scene.
- Foreground: bicycle painted black
- Mid–ground: clothes painted in bright colours
- Background: Lamp post and TV dish grey and shaded. Walls in sepia Tone. The gap between the two walls: beige
I used a loose watercolour technique for the entire sketch, and mixed a burnt umber colour for the clothes pegs out of the pink and lime green, and added some paint splatters for effect.
Inking and Painting Separately
I need to dial back some of these style elements in future sketches to get to a look and feel which feels complimentary to my visual style. I’m off on a quick European jaunt next month, so I’d like to get some practice in before then.
When I travel with MOH, I usually do ink lines while I’m out and about, and paint the images when I have back to base. This loose painting style lends itself to that approach, because with Toni’s loose painting style you have to add a lot of water, and leave plenty of time for your sketches to dry. So this isn’t a technique you could do very easily while urban sketching if you need to sketch and paint while on location.
