South Wales Urban Sketcher: My Journey as An Artist/Sketcher

My Journey as An Artist/Sketcher

Like a lot of kids, I used to sketch all the time while I was growing up. In particular I'd copy my favourite Marvel superheroes from comics, then when I started to get interested in trains, I'd sketch from old photographs of them in magazines. I loved the TV show "Doctor Who" and I made a lot of sketches based on magazine photographs.

Then the time came to choose options at school when I was 13/14 years old. Art was an optional rather than a compulsory subject. I was honest enough to admit that while I had some talent for sketching, I had none whatsoever for painting or using colour in other ways. Bearing in mind that the Art teacher was not exactly beating a path to my door, I opted out.

I wouldn't say that I gave up on sketching, but certainly when I left school to study English Literature at University, I didn't tend to keep it up. Which was nice in one way, when I did come to do a sketch seeing my friends' reactions.

As the decades went by, I'd use my sketching ability from time to time as part of my job as an English teacher, but by and large, other than doodles, if I made a couple of sketches a year, that was about the length of it. My mother must have had some inkling about the amateur artist inside of me desperate to get out, since she bought me a very nice set of acrylic paints for my 40th birthday. I didn't open it for 11 years, I'm sorry to say.

I have 4 daughters and a son. My middle daughter took Art seriously, and earned a degree in ceramics. After finishing her degree she was very serious about keeping it up, and to this extent she found a local Art group. I don't know what prompted me to suggest that I'd like to give it a try, but I'm so glad that I did. She found that the group wasn't what she was looking for. I, on the other hand, found it very much to my liking, and I've been attending ever since.

At first, I was nervous about exposing myself to potential criticism, and so I stuck with what I knew, making pencil sketches. However, as I became to feel more secure, I pushed myself to use charcoal.

This was only the second charcoal picture I ever made, and it's the first picture I ever sold. I want to stress now that I sketch for my own pleasure and fulfilment. I don't care if I can sell pictures I make or if I can't. But if people offer me money for them, then I won't often refuse. The group were exhibiting at a local beach festival, and this was one of the only two pictures which sold. I didn't stop grinning for several days.

I dug out the old acrylic set Mum gave me for my 40th birthday. I did worry that the paints would be all dried up, being more than a decade old, but actually they were fine. Here's a couple of my first ever acrylic paintings, which show my shortcomings: -

The top one is my first ever self portrait, on the beach with my grandson. This actually caused mini civil war amongst my family as several of them all claimed it - his mum won that one. This is why I painted the second one underneath, which is now with my mother in law. The VW camper van I painted as a present for Zara, the daughter who discovered the artists group.

I could pick the paintings to shreds, but the point is that I was starting from scratch as regards painting and colour. One of the things I said to myself was that I was going to be quite open about my art, and post it on Facebook, and accept if people wanted to criticise. Within a couple of months all my friends knew about my new interest.

Although my first paintings were quite personal, I did start painting less personal subjects which interested me. I've always liked steam locomotives and trams, for example. Here's some examples in acrylic:-

Now, I'm never going to be a professional artist, but I couldn't help wondering whether anyone else would be interested in my art. So I started putting some of my paintings on eBay. All of these paintings were sold on eBay, and the second one down led to my first commission from someone I've never met.

I'd pretty much moved away from producing charcoal sketches by this time, but if I was going away anywhere, then I'd always take my paints away with me. So, it was on a visit to my inlaws who live near Alicante that I made this acrylic sketch:-

One of the places where I sometimes showcase my pictures is the painters online gallery. I posted this one, and one of the comments made a reference to urban sketching. I found out more, and realised that this was most definitely for me.

So my journey as an urban sketcher began. Almost exactly the same time, my 3rd daughter, who had started working in a local travel agents, hit on the brilliant idea of getting her siblings to club together, and buy me a trip as a combined birthday present. The first one was to Belgium, to visit the grave of my great grandfather who was killed near Ypres in world war I. It was an inspired idea, probably the best birthday present I've ever had. I started off on this trip sketching in ordinary HB pencil: -

I kept sketching on my return, and tried out various media, but when I bought my first pack of Faber-Castell sketching pens, I was hooked. This is the first sketch I made with them.

I wasn't sketching to the detriment of all other art forms at this time. I was still painting in acrylics. In the Autumn of 2016 I even made a couple of decent watercolours which I sold - t

In the early months of 2017, things were just not right with me. I was feeling like I had never felt before. It had been building up for a long time, but when I finally went to see the Doctor, he diagnosed me with clinical depression. I underwent a treatment of medication, and was off work for 8 weeks. During this time I have no doubt that it was the time and the medication which did most to helping me recover. However I also have no doubt that painting and sketching played their part.

I'm not entirely sure why I made my first horse racing painting, but it was during the period I was off work with depression. If you're working on a painting, or even a sketch, it's all that's on your mind, and I found that this was quite beneficial. I made these two paintings,

It's definitely a subject I like, and I think showed some improvement in my technique. Both paintings sold, and led to me receiving a commission. I also painted this one, which is actually my mother's favourite, and has pride of place in her living room.

AT the same time, though, I was making more and more sketches. In fact, after returning to work, I came up with a challenge, which I felt might keep me sketching, which to my mind certainly had therapeutic benefits. I challenged myself to make 100 sketches of the South Wales town I've been living in for the last 3 decades, Port Talbot. To keep myself going, I made a blog which I called 100 Faces of Port Talbot, and the link to this blog is in my links section.

Here's a selection of the sketches on the blog: -

I made these sketches, and more importantly, I posted them on the blog and on Facebook for no other reason than for the ego boost from feedback from friends and acquaintances. However this did have an unexpected result. 2 local restaurants contacted me to ask if they could buy the images of their businesses to use on menus and other material. Certainly could. I've also come to do some work for a wedding stationery business as well. None of which is enough for me to call myself a professional, but it's done wonders for my ego.

In 2018 the sketching has pretty much taken over. I joined the South Wales Urban Sketchers chapter in 2017, but since the start of 2018 I've become far more active in monthly sketchcrawls. I've been trying a lot harder with adding watercolour to urban sketches as well. You can maybe see the progress in comparing this sketch from 2017: -

with this single page spread from March 2018:-

If you decide to give urban sketching a go yourself - and I sincerely hope that you will, because it's a great hobby - you'll probably find that you never quite get to the stage where you're 100% satisfied with your skills and what you produce. In my case, I'm pretty happy with what I can do with my ink pens. Which doesn't mean that my style isn't changing, as it is, which I'll explain a little further down the page. But it means that I'm pretty certain that if I do a straight ink sketch, the majority of the time it is going to end up looking the way that I intended it was going to look when I first put pen to paper.

Not so line and wash. Basically line and wash - or ink and wash - is the type of sketch whereby washes of watercolour paint are applied to the basic ink sketch. My favourite urban sketchers are just brilliant at this. As you can tell from the ink and watercolour sketches above, I'm not. I've been drawing with pencil or pen for so long now that I like to think I understand what I'm doing with them. I never felt that way with paint, especially watercolour. I looked at watercolour wash sketches online which I liked, and watched tutorials, but it didn't seem to help - all I came up with was stuff like this:-

You can boil down the problems with these two to : -
* they're not great ink sketches, made with biro before I found proper sketching pencils
* the materials - paints and paper - were very cheap and not great to work with
* the colours are very weak and washed out.

These were both made in 2016. Fair enough. But even by the Spring of 2018, most of the watercolour stuff I was coming up with wasn't a lot better: -

Accepted that this is a slightly better ink sketch, and it's made on better quality paper, using better quality paints, it really isn't that much better, is it? Even when I did make progress it seemed that this was piecemeal and haphazard. Compare these next two sketches:-

For me this is so much better because the colours are much stronger, and there are areas where different colours mingle on the statues on the left. It was definitely on the right lines for where I eventually wanted to be.However then I would go on and make something like this:-

Bold colours, yes, but it's pretty horrible when all is said and done. I'm being far too busy with the colour trying to render the buildings literally, which doesn't work. This was made on an A5 piece of paper - for me to do the same scene successfully I think now I'd need at least an A5.

I have an Urban Sketching friend whose line and wash work I do admire. Studying some of his pictures led me to make this:-

I'm still being very literal with my palette, but using a larger piece if paper you can at least see that it has enabled me to use blocks of colour. Also I'd noticed that my friend deliberately uses thicker ink lines in places, which you can see even more clearly here.

This next was an interesting experiment which didn't quite work. Looking at it NOW, I can say with some confidence that there's too much of the room with the window and not enough of the view through the window. The blank space is too cluttered and fussy, and there's just too much of it.

As sketches, these look more like my friend's work than anything else I'd produced up to this point. So I used this same technique for my summer sketching expedition to Madrid. Yet with these being smaller sketches on smaller paper in my journal, I can't say I was particularly delighted with any of them. And when you get right down to it, they're decent enough work, but nowhere near the results my friend achieves. So this was a technique available to me, but maybe not the right way forward for me. What was, though?

Over the Christmas holiday of 2018, I spent some time making fairly meticulous copies of a couple of line and wash sketches that I absolutely love. In particular I made this sketch which is an inferior copy of a sketch of Chester's East Gate by a wonderful artist called Ian Fennelly.

As I said, you'll see just how inferior it is if you find the original online. But the fact is that just trying to produce something of this quality made me think about just how he achieves such great work, and drew me to a couple of conclusions:-
* you can get incredible results by playing with perspective, exaggerating incline away from the perpendicular, even when the original has perpendicular straight lines.
* Using wet on wet you can get great effects with colours mixing.
* If you don't think too literally about colours you can get some great effects.
* In the same way that you use perspective, you can use colour to direct the eye to the main focus of the picture. You can do this by fading out the colours away from the centre of attention, and unpainted areas can be more effective this way.
* Bigger blocks of colour work better than attempting to paint in colour in miniscule detail. Therefore a sketch made on a larger scale on a larger piece of paper is more likely to work better as a line and wash painting than a smaller one.

None of this is rocket science I'm sure, but you've already seen it took me 2 and a half years to get this far. Applying these principles, here's some of the results I achieved

This isn't maybe a great example of fading the colour, although thinking about it the statue is the focus, so I don't know. Being that much bigger - the paper I used was larger than A4, although not quite as big as A£ - I was able to get some lovely variation of tone on the statue. I did play with the form on the tower on the far left of the sketch as well.

This is St. Mungo's Cathedral in Glasgow. I've certainly played around with the form here, not totally successfully if I'm honest. It looks interesting, but it isn't quite what I was trying to do. On the positive side although the scan doesn't reproduce this perfectly there's some lovely mingling of colours in places on this sketch.

This is what I think of, at the moment, as my breakthrough line and wash sketch. Maybe the building on the far left is just too exaggerated, but the colours on the building on the right, are everything I wanted to do with a line and wash sketch.

Again, this sketch of the Grand Pavilion in Porthcawl is similarly close to what I was trying to achieve with colour.

The exaggeration for form and perspective is something I wanted to continue to use, but I wanted to find my own way with it. This net sketch was particularly pleasing on this score:-

I'm really pleased with this sketch - and it looks even better in the original since the scan hasn't been kind to some of the greens and blues. I've played a little bit with form which gives this more of a feeling of towering and tapering up into the sky, but also the way that the colours deepen and mix towards the top of the tower is exactly what I was trying to achieve.

No, not an urban sketch of course, this is based on a photo, using the principles outlined above to see how well they work on a building I know so well. And I have to say, I was really pleased with the results. This isn't out of this world - but - it's so much closer to the sort of thing I want to do with line and wash.

Of these two tram pictures I think that the Budapest is the more satisfying whole, probably through the choice of the colours. Mind you it's a much less busy sketch, and it's some of the busy things about this Prague tram picture above that I think work so well. The cars, with only the windscreens painted in a re particularly effective, and I love the blue-green on the windscreen of the tram.

This Amsterdam tram is a dramatic sketch, and one where I really like the balance between painted areas, faded areas, and unpainted areas. It was made on a sketchbook which is larger than A3. This worked, although the paper itself isn't great quality and I found it harder to paint on than the paper I'd been using. But this one does look like some of the kind of sketches I've been admiring for the last two years.

I think I probably overdid it with the colour on this one, although I like the way it fades away on the building on the far right, and the other on the far left.