Early Crayon and Watercolours

Soul being laid bare again. Today I've put together a collection of my earliest forays into colour sketching and painting. Dating from 1992 to 1994 I had only picked up a pencil again since leaving school a mere 2 years before and standards had not yet reached the dizzying lows that I achieve today. So: stop that sniggering and adopt your most appreciative expressions as we take a look at scribblings from some thirty years ago. Oh blimey... thirty years! I'll carry on after a bit of a sit down...

This view of Portmeirion in Wales started life as a pencil drawing during the early days of my sketching when I used to draw on site (or pleine air as we artist types like to say) but with the main concern being to get it done and stop before anyone came to look over my shoulder and laugh. I needn't have worried too much. The only person who came anywhere near just shouted "I am not a number - I am a free man!" and carried on running, followed by a marching band and a huge bouncing ball. The crayons were added later at home in a secure and safe environment.

An experiment that to-date has never been repeated was this sketch on black paper with pencil crayons of Lytham windmill in Lancashire. It's only small, probably around 5x4 inches (12.5 x 10 cm). Even at home there was a sense of get it done and put it away quick!

First ever watercolour since finishing GCE O Levels (I just managed to fail my art exam...) at school in 1970. Actually the traction engine isn't bad, but the forest that only existed in my head is pretty dire I admit. Perhaps it says something about the state of my mind at the time? Complex is not the word!

This is a view of Coniston Water from the north west corner of the lake at Monk Coniston. Done from one of my own black and white photos it was as much an excercise (ha! experiment!) in handling distant hills and reflections in water as much as anything.

In 1993 we spent a fortnight's holiday in Florida and visited Cape Kennedy Space Centre one day. You don't get a lot of time for sketching on such a visit and I did this once back at home from a postcard we bought. We were quite narked as our flight home was within a couple of days of a Space Shuttle launch, though in the end it was called off because of the weather anyway.

This was the first sort of serious attempt at a watercolour, again from one of my own photographs of a Blackpool tram. I had bought an A4 pad of watercolour paper boards. This now hangs in the hallway of my mate who insists it was because he liked it rather than just to make me feel good. It did anyway.

I think this may have already sneaked into one the UK sketches articles but it belongs here just as much. I was getting ambitious by this time. This is on a massive A3 bit of paper and is another sketch done from one of my own black and white photos, this time of Knaresborough in Yorkshire. A bit scribbly as yet, particularly in the tree department, but it did take me a long time to get to grips with drawing trees which I still do with a sort of slightly more controlled scribble these days. This marked a start at using several colours in the same spot to achieve some form of texture or effect.

This technique was taken to extremes in the eye of this eagle portrait, this time from a detail of someone else's painting (I'm not that daft as to get so close to the real thing...). I spent ages on the eye and feel it did pay off. There are lots of different colours in there!

After moving on somewhat with pencil crayons I fancied trying something a bit more ambitious with watercolours. This was on another of the A4 boards, but suffers a little from sticking to a wholly inappropriate brush that came with a child's watercolour set and putting down large blocks of dark colour instead of building up layers. A bit of laziness is a factor here too in that decision! The dark grey of the smoke at the side of the loco is probably the worst of it, the fields could be better but the area around the station buildings and platform at least made me keep it instead of chucking it in the bin!

This watercolour was done from a sheet of paper from the A5 sketch pad and showed me how badly paper reacts to being soaked! As wet parts expanded and dry parts didn't the surface became anything but flat. Again the difficulty in producing fine work with a stiff flat-ended brush led to a 12 year gap between this and my next attempt at watercolours. By then, though, my drawing techniques were getting better.

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