In an effort to mitigate the painful foot, and for my recent birthday, Thomas bought me a bike!
This means that we've been out for short cycle rides in the locality, a new sense of freedom and of reach a bit farther than I've been able to recently. Last weekend we had a nice picnic in Ekeberg park, Thomas making an omelette on the Trangia, and this weekend we went out for a cycle around Østensjøvannet (east Ensjø lake), about 10km which is enough for me right now after all the set backs with my foot this year.
A nice ride, past the new bird hide / lookout on the edge of the lake, a walk up the hill past a heap of snow (sorry folks, the snow is just from the local ice rink!), brakes fully applied down the hill, weaving in and around people of all ages and abilities (ATV/mobility scooters in abundance) and around the eastern side to watch the ducks and geese before flopping down and drinking coffee via Thomas and a gram cracker...
It was great fun and another opportunity to get the sketch pad out and see what might happen. There was a nice line of birch trees with a dark area behind them, sun shining off the leaves closest to me and, with the sun being still relatively high, shadows under the trees themselves.
I did a bit of rough pencil work to start with but got impatient with that pretty quickly and instead started putting some watercolour down, cadmium yellow with some ultramarine to give a pale green band for the fresh grass, then different tones of the same in bands with a broader swipe of mostly ultramarine for sky, trying to keep the paper damp. Normally that wouldn't be a problem here in Oslo given the amount of rain we have, but today, wonderfully, we had brilliant, warm sunshine which means everything dries a lot faster and you (can) end up with backruns galore!
Trying to avoid this I started painting in darker foliage, turning the watercolour pad upside down which helped to free my mind from what it thought was there. It was good to let go and something I'll definitely try again in the early stages.
Unfortunately, control set in again and more and more indistinct watercolour ended up being put down until I looked properly at the scene again and got my watercolour pencils out, along with the Derwent Graphitint. This helped a lot, being more familiar now with how I can use each and having more control. I wanted to emphasise the bands of tone in the landscape in front, with the white of the birch trunks linking each layer.
I'm posting this as a record of any development in the future and for me to learn. I'm not especially happy with the end result, although I enjoyed how organic it felt to develop from watercolour washes to then use of pencil and how a pastel type effect can about, utilising the tooth of the paper. Trying to reframe what I had produced, shown in the first image, I tried different ways of cropping, looking at a more square format of the three trees on the left, and an alternate view of slicing a landscape through in the third image, because I liked the horizontal layers that had emerged and felt this could emphasise this.
In the last image I had thought about the pastel effect and wanted to see if I could reproduce what had developed in my minds eye. Not quite, but it was the first time I'd used pastels for many years, maybe 25 or 30, so I wasn't too disheartened.
I've just started to read Betty Edwards's "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and am wondering how my drawing might change or develop - and hopefully improve!
This means that we've been out for short cycle rides in the locality, a new sense of freedom and of reach a bit farther than I've been able to recently. Last weekend we had a nice picnic in Ekeberg park, Thomas making an omelette on the Trangia, and this weekend we went out for a cycle around Østensjøvannet (east Ensjø lake), about 10km which is enough for me right now after all the set backs with my foot this year.
A nice ride, past the new bird hide / lookout on the edge of the lake, a walk up the hill past a heap of snow (sorry folks, the snow is just from the local ice rink!), brakes fully applied down the hill, weaving in and around people of all ages and abilities (ATV/mobility scooters in abundance) and around the eastern side to watch the ducks and geese before flopping down and drinking coffee via Thomas and a gram cracker...
It was great fun and another opportunity to get the sketch pad out and see what might happen. There was a nice line of birch trees with a dark area behind them, sun shining off the leaves closest to me and, with the sun being still relatively high, shadows under the trees themselves.
I did a bit of rough pencil work to start with but got impatient with that pretty quickly and instead started putting some watercolour down, cadmium yellow with some ultramarine to give a pale green band for the fresh grass, then different tones of the same in bands with a broader swipe of mostly ultramarine for sky, trying to keep the paper damp. Normally that wouldn't be a problem here in Oslo given the amount of rain we have, but today, wonderfully, we had brilliant, warm sunshine which means everything dries a lot faster and you (can) end up with backruns galore!
Trying to avoid this I started painting in darker foliage, turning the watercolour pad upside down which helped to free my mind from what it thought was there. It was good to let go and something I'll definitely try again in the early stages.
Unfortunately, control set in again and more and more indistinct watercolour ended up being put down until I looked properly at the scene again and got my watercolour pencils out, along with the Derwent Graphitint. This helped a lot, being more familiar now with how I can use each and having more control. I wanted to emphasise the bands of tone in the landscape in front, with the white of the birch trunks linking each layer.
I'm posting this as a record of any development in the future and for me to learn. I'm not especially happy with the end result, although I enjoyed how organic it felt to develop from watercolour washes to then use of pencil and how a pastel type effect can about, utilising the tooth of the paper. Trying to reframe what I had produced, shown in the first image, I tried different ways of cropping, looking at a more square format of the three trees on the left, and an alternate view of slicing a landscape through in the third image, because I liked the horizontal layers that had emerged and felt this could emphasise this.
In the last image I had thought about the pastel effect and wanted to see if I could reproduce what had developed in my minds eye. Not quite, but it was the first time I'd used pastels for many years, maybe 25 or 30, so I wasn't too disheartened.
I've just started to read Betty Edwards's "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and am wondering how my drawing might change or develop - and hopefully improve!