Sketching on a Sunny Winter Day

Last week I grabbed advantage of the beautiful weather, grabbed my sketchbook, and did some stuff. I started with a few (crappy!) watercolour washes, let them dry, then drew on top. The goal was to get the "feel" of what I was looking at, not so much be precise in representing it accurately.

This first one was done beside the little seasonal trickle of water that skirts our wetland; the melt is causing a lot of runoff, so the trickle was burbling along very merrily. Clockwise from upper left (interpreting my chicken-scratch) are the reflections off the moving water with reeds & grasses at the edges, then the movement of water across a rill, submerged pebbles where I just drew the dark areas kind of around the pebbles (not exactly negative space drawing, but it kind of worked out that way), then finally the reflection of a twig as the water moved the reflection.
Next is a stand of alders at the edge of our little pond, with conifers in the background. This is pretty much all about interpreting the negative spaces.
Once again, the weather was beautiful today, but it looks like it's changing, so I wanted to get out and get some more sketches done.

This first one is of the winter aconite (or Acontium) poking up through the leaf litter in a little patch of sunny garden out front. They, together with snowdrops, are probably the earliest little flowers to poke up out of the ground around here, and even then, they're quite late this year because of the heavy snow load we had around Christmas and New Years (there is still snow on our field). Anyway, I did a semi-blind contour drawing with sepia-coloured Pigma pen, then built up the painting. I was trying to keep the glow and delicacy of the flowers, and the loose and messy nature of the leaf litter.
Next up was the hazelnut outside our living room window. I parked my stool by the bird feeder and was scolded a few times for interrupting the dinner party, but they continued without a bother nonetheless. I loved the way the flowers of the hazelnut glow in the winter sun, especially against the deep darks of the conifers in the background. Plus, the shadows on the snow were just delicious; I had a lot of fun mixing the colours for them.
Finally (and I was getting kind of cold by now, so I didn't spend as much time on this one), the old Gravenstein apple tree, all gnarly, pock-marked and in need of a winter hair-cut (Dave's not been over in time yet to do so). Mostly, I had fun dropping wet colours into wet.
Now, I am definitely not comfortable with watercolours, and am not someone to follow when it comes to using this media, but I sure like to use them in the field for sketching, and adding colour.

More Sketches

These tulips are actually from our trip to Mom's earlier last month; I've just been away from my computer/scanner for so long that I'd not yet had a chance to scan them in and post to the blog. I go for a month with nothing, and now you're inundated with stuff!!!

I'm really happy with the tulip colour in the first one, but I got carried away trying to get the right colour in the second one, and lost the highlights and obfuscated the line work more than I would have preferred.

Tulips - Watercolour & pen, approximately 7"x10"

Rococo Parrot Tulip - Watercolour & pen, approximately 7"x10"

This one is from my Dad's - it's definitely not at all what I had in mind; this is why I hate watercolour. I don't have the patience to spend the time learning how to use the medium, hence I won't ever really get any good at it. I really had liked the way the dark greens of the spruces made the bright aspen trunks & their brand-new spring green leaves leap out. I was planning on doing a lot of negative painting on that left-hand side, but got a wicked headache from the reflection of the sun off the white paper; how do artist's deal with that? Probably don't arse around as long as I do with their work! Needless to say, this is not one of my stellar moments in art...

Tree sketch - watercolour, approximately 7"x10"

These next ones are from two separate birds that schmucked themselves against Dad's window; both on the same day! Poor things. So I took advantage of their stillness. The watercolours in the second one aren't quite as disappointing as the above tree sketch, but still not quite right. At least the colours are relatively accurate.

Brown-headed Cowbird, male - graphite, approximately 8"x11"

Western Tanager, female - graphite & watercolours
approximately8"x4" and 3"x3", respectively