Over the past few months things have been very quiet on the blog, so thought I’d do a series of posts updating what I have been doing behind the scenes. I have been focusing on improving my drawing skills over the past few months and have been attending the “Ribble Valley Urban sketchers” and “Blackburn artists society” as well as doing bits and pieces at home in my own time, attending workshops and experimenting with new materials, all with a bit of PVA glue and puppets thrown in for good measure!
Today I will focus on my Urban Sketching practice.
With the Ribble Valley Urban sketchers a group of artists go out and draw Urban landscapes on location. I have joined them on a couple of sessions with my Mother In law Joanna who has been attending for a while. We’ve been out drawing at Whalley Abbey and Oswaldtwistle Mills, both in Lancashire, and each time we have gotten a bit braver with drawing outside as this was something totally outside our comfort zone.
I have always considered myself more comfortable with paint as a medium and Going out with Urban Sketchers has encouraged me to experiment with line drawing using pens, pencils and pencil crayons.
Here are a few examples of the work I did whilst at Urban Sketchers over the past few months.
This is a picture I did of a stair case at Whalley Abbey in Whalley in the Ribble Valley. I went prepared with a piece of paper with a water colour back ground then sketched on the day with pencil crayons, pens and inks.
This picture I did on location at Oswaldtwistle Mills in Oswaldtwistle in East Lancashire. I used pens for this picture and also used a process called continual line drawing, where I attempted to draw the majority of the scene without taking my pen off the page so the black pen is nearly all a continuous line. I really enjoyed this process as it helped to really loosen up my drawing.
This is another picture I did on location at Oswaldtwistle Mills, again a single continuous line drawing but the colour was added afterwards with water colours. I liked this picture but thought it looked like the seaside rather than a Mill in East Lancashire!
I hope you have enjoyed looking at some of my recent work, I’d like to share more of my progress with you in future posts.
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