Well hello there, you delicious, little critter. Come closer, my paws are weary, claws worn down to nubs after hiking up and down little green mountains all week. Still too far away, sigh, so it’s to be spaghetti carbonara for dinner.
Once again it’s Friday and time for fuzzy-headed ol’ me to scrape together something to kick off another pint-sized, community open thread. I’m off in Jeseníky, a clump of middling mountains in the north-eastern part of the Czech Republic. Perhaps next week I’ll have the time to sort through my photos and share a bit of the scenery, but because I’m still on this vacation until tomorrow I thought I’d share the results of my sketching efforts for this trip.
I suppose I’ve enjoyed sketching outdoors since I was in elementary school, but it’s not as if I was instantly possessed by a burning need to sketch everything. It was only much later in my life that I began getting together with a small group of similarly sketchy characters to draw, somewhat regularly, in the streets and parks of the city where I live. I started taking a sketchbook with me on trips I’d take with my family, especially on the week-long trips we take every summer with our friends from the neighborhood. I haven’t found the hubris or indeed the need to stalk off somewhere on my own to go sketching every day of these vacations, but I usually manage to find a few hours.
Equipping oneself for sketching outdoors can be as simple as tucking a pencil and a tiny note-pad into a pocket— but I tend to forget that. I’d have a lot more to share this week if I’d kept my ambitions in check and my backpack lighter.
That said, I think I keep my baggage reasonably reasonable. I see you artists out there lugging your easels around, I see you with your crates on wheels dragging behind you like soon-to-be-rejected carry-on bags at the airport. I keep things cheap and simple. Okay, I am cheap and simple, but there’s really no need to spend enormous sums of money on tons of expensive brushes and a bazillion tubes and cakes of color.
Anyway, that’s how this particular sketch started. A bit of bluey-gray indicating the more defined clouds on an overcast day and the most distant line of hills on the horizon. I left the group to hike one end of the trail and I headed down the other to find a spot to sketch. A spot where the trees opened up to a view over layers of meadow, pasture, hedges and forests, hills and low mountains with a convenient picnic table for me to sit at was an easy choice. The more-or-less final stage of the sketch (I probably won’t touch it, but there are sections that need a lot of work) ended up like this:
A couple of days I got out a tiny jar of my homemade walnut ink and sketched using a dip pen and a few different brushes.
There are a lot of ways in which the art supplies business mystifies the tools of the trade for fun and profit. When I was digging my supplies out of the backpack I could only find one large flat brush that I’d tucked into a side pocket for slopping on broad swathes of paint. The other two, much smaller, brushes that I’d brought along were buried under the jackets I was carrying for my family (aren’t they lucky it didn’t rain). So, that entire picture was painted using an inch-wide flat brush and a dip pen with a sharp drawing nib. Probably my best professor in college told me that the tip of any brush is a single hair— so bigger brushes not only save you time by holding more ink per trip to the well, but if handled with a bit of dexterity can replace all the skinny brushes in your bag.
That’s all true, but I waited to paint the leaves on this next piece until I’d found my buried round brush.
When I’m outdoors sketching I’m not just capturing what I see in front of me like I do when I take pictures using my camera. The process of sketching takes time and all the time I’m sketching I’m aware of what’s going on around me and all the details of that experience which don’t make it onto the paper tend to stick around in my brain. I look back at that watercolor and remember the voices of the people who passed behind me as I sketched, the tiny bright spots (which were pale-skinned cattle) which moved into one of the most distant meadow, I remember the mysterious rustles in the pile of brush, the taste of the sandwich Mrs. the Werelynx made for my lunch— which I ate before packing up and moving on to the location of the next sketch in this diary.
The last couple years I’ve tried to be a bit more ambitious with my sketching and have made several journeys out into the world with a box of oil paints tucked into my backpack. The only really difficult thing is figuring out a method of packing wet paintings, but tape, push-pins and cardboard can be used to great effect and I’ve been known to complete several small paintings over a week and pack them all safely home. This trip I’ve only managed one rather unfinished sketch of a chateau. Sometimes my cheap methods and materials don’t work to my advantage as I found with my experimenting with a new brand of interior house paint instead of that horribly expensive gesso glop from the art supply shop. It didn’t take the ink [edit: paint! I meant, paint!] well at all and it took far too long to work the colors up in layers. Gesso is just gypsum (plaster) plus a binder like acrylic as are many white interior house paints— glorified whitewash essentially. I just happened to choose one that was a bit too dry and absorbent. Instead of gliding on, my oil paints were sucked dry and my brushes skidded to awkward stops in chalky clumps that took forever to work through. At home I’ll try sealing my remaining hunks of paint-slathered, old Masonite with a bit of a neutral tone of acrylic paint and try again.
It’s our last night in Jeseníky and you’ll have to forgive me for posting this to the queue and hopping downstairs to socialize. I will be hoping to be hopping down to the comments to socialize soon.
Thanks for stopping by.
Please share your own sketching experiences, your thoughts, your links, pictures and causes, a bit of your week, a good soup recipe… whatever you will (anybody get a good look at the Perseid meteor shower this week?). This is, after all, an open thread.