On a recent visit to the far end of Cornwall we visited Bedruthan Steps – this is a dramatic section of coastline where the Cornish giant Bedruthan is said to have thrown huge boulders into the sea just off the cliffs so that he could use them as stepping stones from one headland to the next. Whilst my husband undertook a precipitous descent down to sea level, I decided that here was a good subject to use for this exercise.
My on-the-spot sketch from my perch on a rock at the cliff-top (see A4 sketchbook) was done with the only pencil I had in my pockets, a 4B, so it is dark and dramatic. I thought I had expertly dashed it off in the blink of an eye until a group of walkers came over and said “You’ve obviously been here ages – has the tide started going out yet?” Grr. I am finding that by far the greatest hazard in working outdoors is the random comments I get from passers-by.
This image seemed to have an obvious foreground (the fence and cliff-edge), middle ground (the rocks) and background (the far headland). When doing my drawing inside, I decided to work from the back forwards, starting with a very hard pencil (2H) and gradually changing to an HB and then up through the B range as I came further forward, with just a little colour in the immediate foreground. I have tried to use some directional marks and shading – on a visit to the Penwith gallery in St. Ives I found a card drawn by an artist called Mary Ann Green – see notes in A3 sketchbook. I googled her – she is not particularly famous, but I really liked the style of her landscapes, which depended on strong dark areas as against some light, almost blank, areas, directional lines, and the use of bits of colour. Thought I’d give it a go – what could go wrong?
So, how did that go?
Positive – I think the brief of demonstrating aerial perspective has been met in the drawing and I have established a sense of distance which was not so clear in the sketch.
Less positive – I feel the drama and energy of the original sketch has been lost to some extent in the worked-up drawing.
Reflections on exercises 1 & 2
- Simplifying and selecting: this is always a struggle and I haven’t yet tried out the grid method which would provide, amongst other things, a natural frame. I have relied on looking at a wide landscape (as in the Ex1 ink pictures of the moor, and the coastal scene in Ex2), deciding which part of the landscape must be in the composition come hell or high water, then scanning the vista from there and deciding “well, I’ll go up to here and here but no further” so that I had mental boundary edges before I started. Simplifying is definitely a target to work on – I am starting to leave things out – think this went well with the moor pictures, less well with the charcoal/rubber garden drawing, where I needed to lose most of the background but faithfully put it in anyway….
- Sense of distance and form – think I managed this better in the Ex 2 work – but then I had a BIG distance to work with. The “photo negative” style drawings in Ex 1 have got some nice 3D variations in tone which I am pleased with, although attempts to put less details in the background, especially the garden picture, have made it look a bit flat and child-like and would have been better omitted or just suggested.
- Use of light and shade – I suppose it is because it’s October, but none of these drawings were done on bright sunny days which would have offered dramatic shadow areas; so shadows have been caused more by structures such as rock formations. I know that in the moor drawings (Ex 1), my inexperience with the Chinese brush technique led me to work very quickly and wetly which means that some of my shade is not consistent within the picture – live and learn.
- Additional preliminary work – I did take a photo of Bedruthan Steps, although from slightly higher up than my initial viewpoint, so this was some use as reference. I had also been looking so hard at form, shape and shade that I didn’t pay too much attention to colour, and wished I had made a few notes about that on my initial sketch.
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