A composition a day (well, this is day 1)

One of my actions for this month (and last month too) was to study composition. I know it's a fundamental of painting, but it's always been something I struggled with. Maybe a concept too abstract for my practical mind? But I am working my way through Ian Roberts's YouTube videos on the subject, and I got his book too. Progress is slow, but progress it is all the same. Look at me, I am actually doing thumbnails (10x10cm) with pencil!! Ian Roberts says that if you do one of these a day, you will see rapid improvement. Well this is Day 1!! And I do need to draw more! But whether I will get fed up with this or not remains to be seen. I just like to paint!!

Brushes for me

A mix of some of the brushes I bought for $5 and a selection of standard Procreate brushes . It took me forever to figure out how to do it, but I finally managed to create a set of my favourite brushes. Then I tried them all!

Great way to distract myself from a painting that's not coming together!!

Procreate skeching

Still obsessed with my photos from our holiday in France last September. But finding it hard to capture the light and feel of the place. And somehow cars seem to be the central theme of all these places.

So I tried a version in Procreate, and I like this view better than the previous one.Well at least I feel it's more achievable. Can I do this in watercolour?

 

Procreate brushes

Procreate equals procrastination?

I spent 5 dollars for a great set of brushes for drawing. Now I need to find a set of watercolour brushes that won't break the bank! And I need to actually use Procreate! It didn't even make it into my 2022 goals. But I enjoyed spending a bit of time trying these new brushes

Brushstrokes, and experiments

The fact that I haven't jumped to half sheet this year yet is not a good sign. I think I have simply picked a subject that I am not ready for. The subtle shading of the shutters on the white wall, the light and shade, the car, it's all getting too much.

Well, time for one more practise!

I love the darker shadows under the shutters, but I think I'm jumping values too much. The second line on the left looks better. And note to self, the windows will follow the perspective line, but the slightly open shutters go up against it. Still, I have to remember that the starting point of the next shutter to the right is down the perspective line. That's a lot to remember for my aging brain!

At this point, I decided I needed to try something different. So I decided to paint from a photo I took down in Inchydoney a couple of weeks ago. It's a while since I've painted skies!

Although the original is not quite as bright as this, it's still too bright. More cloud experimentation needed to get back to where I was with clouds a few years ago!

Nothing is working out quite as I want! Deep breath! Trying different brushes. And definitely works better with fresh paint!

matcha latte

 Just a quick sketch before my matcha latte goes cold. Pen and Ecoline markers.

Guinness

Some days, I just feel in the zone, I find the right spot and all the stars align.

This was a couple of weeks ago, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The chosen location was around the Guiness tourist centre, but also near the old brewery itself. Guinness used to be such an olfactory presence in Dublin. The roasting of the hops (I think!) could be smelled all around the city. Now they have all sorts of filters and scrubbers, and that olfactory sensation is just a memory for me. But sketching close to the brewery, I came across that smell again, and I felt 35 years younger, full of energy and passion for the city I call home. Yes, home is in Dublin. I knew it instantly. And it is still true today.

And guinness was my drink of choice for a very long time. Still is really. At home, I'm more of a prosecco girl. But if I'm out and they don't have Seedlip alcohol-free gin, a glass of guinness will make me happy. I'm not much of a drinker. My body could never take alcohol, no matter how much I tried!

Coming back to the sketches, I found a perfect little corner at the entrance of a construction site, with the perfect view of all the vats and pipes, and the sun on my back, important on a cold January day. I don't know the technical terms for all these big cylinders, or even what they do, but I sure loved sketching them.

You could call this one my warm-up sketch. I was walking around, trying to find my spot, and as I passed beside Saint James's Church, I noticed how the cylinder with all the pipes looked so interesting behind one of the church buttresses. So I stood at the gate, peering between the railings, and drew this one in a smaller sketchbook (Portrait A5).

Custom House

We've been lucky the last few Sundays in January. It's been bloody cold, but the weather has stayed dry. I think this one, the Custom House, was our first meeting of the year. A good few people turned up, with a few new sketchers, which is always lovely. 

The Custom House is a huge building, right on the river, so unless you're on the other side of the Liffey, it's hard to capture it all. On this occasion, I didn't even try! I sat right in front of the central entrance, with its huge dome and statues and I started to sketch in direct watercolour. Because I was so close to it, everything was distorted, but that's a great excuse, isn't it!! 

The Custom House was burnt and badly damaged in 2021, during the war of independence. It was rebuilt at a later stage, with the top under the dome, done in an Irish stone, noticeably darker than the original British stone. There was more restoration work done in the eighties, and a major cleanup in the last few months. There was so much beautiful detail that I noticed while sketching, like one of the statues had a beehive beside her, a symbol of industry I think. The detail in the pediment (yes, I had to spend 10 minutes on Google to find what the triangle bit is called!!) is clear from the ground, with ships, Neptune, Britannia, Hibernia, cherubins, etc. perfectly visible from where I was standing on the footpath.  But have a look at this article for a close-up. The video is quite interesting, if a little hard to hear because of the traffic.

When I was done, I turned around, and painted the colour of the river Liffey.

PS: the little circle with a Japanese lady is a sticker I added later to cover an element of my drawing that didn't work so well.

It was a cold day of course, and I was delighted when the staff at the new visitor centre invited us to come in from the cold. There is an exhibition about the fire and the history of the building, but I was more interested in the view from the windows. And the heat from the radiators. I had to take my coat off it was so warm!

The Ulster Bank building feels like it's been there forever, and the volumes are really simple once you look at it from this point of view!

And of course there's more construction going on, forever eating away at the beauty of the old Dublin.

I coloured these two at home. Here's how they looked on location.

And the Urban Sketcher shots, which are really hard to do in the winter!

Skies - need more juicy paint!

It's a while since I've painted skies. Not happy. I need to practise more with juicy paints. Funny, well actually not very funny, how it is when I move from one subject to another, it's like I lose my skills in one area while I gain in others. Life is too short!

 

Mini-break sketches

We were lucky to be able to escape the January gloom for a few days, going to Inchydoney down in West Cork. Blessed with the weather, we walked on the beach a lot, and went for a little drive down to Galley Head to enjoy the power of the Atlantic, with its waves crashing against land. I managed to sketch a good bit, but had to abandon my plans for watercolours, as I had forgotten my little chair, and it was too much of a struggle to stand, hold my A4 book, with the palette clipped and my jar of water on a rock. The sand was too wet to sit. Still, I did manage two on the first morning!

This one was done in a portrait smaller (B5?) sketchbook. More manageable, but as you can see it was taking forever for the paint to dry.

So after that, I just used a couple of pens, adding marker colour later on. This one was done on a pre-painted background, a technique I want to work on at some stage. So handy for the winter!

A few from Galley Head, a wild little spot, with water gushing through a blowhole around high tide! I added colour marker when I got home.

Here are the sketches as done on location

On the last day, we took it easy, sitting around the lounge, going for walks on the beach right in front of the hotel, and I got to sketch some more!

The waiter in the lounge, a young French man by the name of Timothy (I think they recycle the name tags!) commented on my drawing. He likes to draw too. I recommended he makes contact with Urban Sketchers Sydney when he goes there!

Done on the beach while my other half was flying his drone.

Done from the hotel room balcony.

(He's better looking than that!)

One last sketch in the morning on the beach before we head home!

And I forgot to add the Urban Sketcher pictures!

Doodles and mark making, Explore and play

New Year, new me. I'm setting 2 hours a week to explore and play with tools that I don't normally use much. No expectation, no pressure. It's important to me to regain that balance about art-making. I think I will do better in the long term if it's not all about making lovely paintings. And when I say I will do better, I mean my progress in terms of drawing and painting, and also in my mental well-being and feeling happy with making art just for the sake of it. I feel that lately, it's all become too serious, art, the world, my life, and I feel the need to find that lightness of being that seems to be missing at the moment. There are things I can't change, but how I react to these things, I can. Not all of the exploration is going to look pretty, that's what exploration is about after all. But if I can draw/paint three paint tubes that make me happy, it's all been worth it!

Persimmons

Nothing like a difficult subject to send me on a little procrastination journey. In fairness, this persimmon tree was in the same town, and I took the picture on the same day!