During our holiday we stayed in the lovely apartment located in a house with stunning grounds. I had plans to do some sketching of trees, flowers and maybe the house, but only got around to doing this quick sketch of the view from the window.
I attempted to sketch on the moving steam train only to find out that it is more wobbly than the modern ones and I couldn’t get any of my lines to be straight
I was planning to have a quick sketch of my son on the right to fill in the space, but he was too excited to stay still.
I managed to get my son to nap in the apartment twice. On the second occasion I walked to the beach and tried to capture some of the majesty and beauty of the sea and the sky.
The sketch was a total failure, but I learned few lessons:
- I don’t have enough watercolour skills to produce the work I want, but at least now I have some understanding about what type of techniques I can use to create the desired effects
- I need to use better paper for the watercolour sketches as I couldn’t paint wet-on-wet or do more than one-two layers
- I dislike the selection of the Daler-Rowney student grade watercolours in my outdoor set and need to find the time to figure out what colours work for me
- If I had to choose one subject for the paintings to concentrate on, it would be the Sky (closely followed by flowers and people)
During the first nap in the apartment I spent over an hour doing a slow watercolour sketch of the shells we found on one of our walks.
It was done in the Moleskine watercolour sketchbook and the results are much better. I have no idea why I didn’t think to use it for my outdoor sketch, specially because the landscape format would’ve been perfect for a change. Maybe having too many choices isn’t always the best thing and carrying two sketchbooks is definitely not much fun. I like Daler-Rowney A5 portrait sketchbook format, so I’m thinking of trying one of the Stillman & Birn sketchbooks – I just need to figure out which series is the best one for the type of watercolour sketches that I want to do.