Mostly drawing

Bath sketchcrawl, Saturday 21st May – Update

Posted on May 8, 2016 by Ed Mostly

I’ve been watching the weather forecasts closely this week, and there’s been stubborn patch of heavy rain covering Saturday morning in every forecast. It still hasn’t shifted… As sketching in heavy rain is tricky, and sketching in heavy rain on top of a high roof is even trickier I’ve had to cancel the rooftop/Tower part of tomorrow’s sketchcrawl. Sorry! I’d even booked the local paper to come and photograph us in action.

BUT, we’ll still be meeting by the Abbey doors at 11am, for some shared sketching inside the Abbey (beautiful memorial tablets, lofty interior spaces, cosy private chapels, wandering tourists etc). So I hope to see you with your brollies tomorrow. (The Abbey are happy for us to rearrange the extended Tower tour for another time.)

Posted in Bath, buskers, sketchcrawl, urban, urban sketching | Tagged Bath Abbey, rooftop sketching, sketching in Bath, Urban Sketchers Bristol/South West, urban sketching | 4 Comments

Funchal museum

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Ed Mostly

Back to Madeira with some sketches from the Frederico de Freitas museum in Funchal. A small ivory carving (with a lamb on the shoulder and one on the knee, St Agnes?), figures on tiles, and a C19th engraving of Madeira printed in negative. I could have happily spent hours sketching the animated blue figures on their many Delft tiles, carefully following the economical and expressive brush-strokes, all fixed in glaze 300 years ago (“The Delft potters made tiles in vast numbers, estimated at eight hundred million over a period of two hundred years”!).

funchal22914 Derwent Inktense pencil, watercolour, A5 – 20 mins

april16fdfbh1 Noodlers Brown 41 and Namiki blue ink in Kuretake #8 brush-pen, watercolour, A5 – 30 mins

funchal22916 White gel pen, A5 – 30 mins

Posted in brush pen, collections, figures, Inktense, Madeira, museum, objects, Uncategorized, white pen | Tagged drawing of St Agnes, Fleetwood Mac, Frederico de Freitas museum, Funchal museum, sketches of Delft tiles, sketching in Madeira, sketching in museum | 2 Comments

Selfies, again

Posted on April 30, 2016 by Ed Mostly

The usual parade of glum and suspicious late night portraits… Sherry says the third one is how I’ll look when I’m seventy! In the second one my mouth is my third hand, holding the extra brush-pen I’m using. By the next one I’d used elastic to attach two brush-pens together, creating a reversible double-ended ink-brush, much easier to use, if a little odd looking… The first one was done using Derwent Inktense pencils, currently challenging bush-pens as my favourite sketching medium; a dab of water and line becomes tone.

april1615 abbbbbeydfd4 april1608 april1604 april1601 april16fdf1 april16fd1 Derwent Inktense pencils, Lexington grey and Brown 41 in brush-pen and water-brush, watercolour, A5 – about 20 mins each, as it was late and I wanted to get to bed

Posted in brush pen, faces, ink brush, Inktense, self-portrait, technique | Tagged analogue selfies, Anton Karas, brush-pen sketching, Derwent Inktense pencils, monochrome, sketching kit, sketching self-portraits, Sungha Jung | 2 Comments

Around Funchal

Posted on April 28, 2016 by Ed Mostly

More from Madeira, three general views around the capital. The first is from a rocky beach (they’re all rocky on Madeira…) near the harbour, buildings crowding the crumbling cliff. Then looking down a central street towards the surrounding hills, cloud descending. Finally a view from the harbour up to the hills, with more clouds wrapping around the peaks. All in brush-pen (just dilute ink in the last one, hence the washed out look), with the ever-useful white gel pen for fiddly bits.

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Lexington grey in brush-pen and water-brush, water-colour and white gel pen, A5 – 30 mins each

Posted in beach, brush pen, buildings, clouds, coloured paper, holiday, ink brush, Madeira, street scene, urban, urban sketching, white pen | Tagged brush-pen sketching, Lexington grey sketches, sketches of cloudy hills, sketches of Funchal, sketching in Madeira, The Orb, urban sketching, white gel pen sketching | 4 Comments

Sheltering and walking

Posted on April 23, 2016 by Ed Mostly

Madeira is famous for its ‘levadas’, over 2,000km of hand-built irrigation channels with narrow paths alongside that snake along the contours of the hills, bringing water from the rainy Northern hilltops to the fertile Southern slopes. Our first attempt to walk them was rained off, so we spent a happy couple of hours in an inn, drinking coffee, eating pastries, and drying out by a lovely fire instead. During our stay several coach loads of other tourists arrived and left, and a cockerel pottered about, pecking crumbs off the floor while the rain hammered down outside. A couple of days later we managed a proper levada walk, and I did a couple of quick pencil sketches as we went, keeping half an eye on the unguarded sheer drops that kill several walkers each year…

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All sorts, including pencil, fountain-pen and ink-brush, all A5 – various times

Posted in Birds, brush pen, fire, holiday, ink brush, Madeira, travel, walking | Tagged levada sketches, levada walking, Ribeiro Frio, sketches of cockerel, sketches of fireplace, sketching in Madeira, The Quik | Leave a comment

Madeirans

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Ed Mostly

People watching in Madeira, where the fine weather encourages lots of public loafing; very helpful for sketchers! The first three were done using Derwent Inktense pencils. They’re very smooth to draw with, quick to capture an expressive line, non-smudging (the key draw-back with my favourite 5B pencils) and full of pigment when wet with a water-brush; a very handy sketching tool.

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funchal221 Derwent Inktense pencils, ink-brush with Lexington grey, water-colour, A5/A4 – various times

Posted in figures, holiday, line drawing, Madeira, monochrome, pencil, people watching, urban, urban sketching | Tagged drawing figures in public, Inktense pencils, Me Me Me, monochrome, pencil sketching, sketching in Madeira, sketching people in public, urban sketching, urban sketching kit | Leave a comment

Madeiran market

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Ed Mostly

Just back from Madeira, a beautiful sub-tropical Portuguese island, 360 miles west of Morocco. Many sketches to share, starting with the main fruit and flower market in Funchal, the capital. I used an acetate grid to mark out key lines, then sketched fairly loosely in pencil from halfway up the stairs, the sketchbook clipped open and mostly stable. If you visit the market watch out for the hard-sell on over-priced passion fruit upstairs, but do enjoy the amazing variety of locally grown fruit and flowers, and the melodiously whistling market porter.

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6B pencil, dilute Lexington grey in water-brush, water-colour, A4 – 40 mins

Posted in buildings, fruit, holiday, Madeira, markets, pencil, people, travel, urban, urban sketching | Tagged Brother Bones, Funchal market, pencil sketch of market, sketch of Funchal market, sketching in Madeira, urban sketching, yellow umbrellas | 5 Comments

Park tree

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Ed Mostly

I went to the Botanical Garden to sketch the magnolias again, but it was shut (“Gates will be locked one hour before sunset”). So I sketched a tree across the road instead. Brown ink in a Kuretake #8 for the line work, and the usual suspects for the rest. Adding layers of dilute Lexington grey lets me boost the contrast in key areas; it’s my favourite part of the whole process, gradually building depth.

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Noodlers Brown 41 in Kuretake #8, Lexington grey in water-brush, watercolour, A5 – 45 mins

Posted in Bath, botany, brush pen, coloured paper, ink brush, Kuretake, park, trees, urban, urban sketching | Tagged brush-pen sketching, building depth in a sketch, ink brush sketching, ink washes for tone, Johnny Cash, sketch of tree, sketching in Bath, urban sketching | 2 Comments

Cloudy

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Ed Mostly

The same cloud sketched four times, continually changing as sunset approached (‘cloud’ is sometimes more verb than noun). The light pencil lines were mostly drawn blind, with watercolour wash added straight after the final drawing, the colours still fading from the sky. The clouds were clouding over a city, and I was stood in the city sketching them; is this urban sketching? Below are some other attempts at clouds from the last few years.

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Pencil and watercolour, A4 – 30 minutes

Posted in Bath, blind drawing, clouds, collections, line drawing, sky, sunset, twilight, watercolour sketch | Tagged blind contour, blind drawing, is this an urban sketch?, Kate Bush, pencil sketches of sky, sketches of clouds, sketching at sunset, sketching the sky | 2 Comments

Magnolias

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Ed Mostly

Three attempts to catch the rich lusciousness of magnolias blooming in Bath’s Botanical Gardens. For the first and last ones I used fountain pen for the initial drawing, for the second one brush-pen and white roller-ball. The white paper and Payne’s Grey wash on the first helps to capture the petal’s glow, but this was scuppered in the last one by using grey paper and grey ink for shading, duh!

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