I had done lots of drawings of the parish Church, both in my little home-made sketchbook and my A3 sketchbook, so wanted to make this the focal point of this study. We walk into town most days and, as you get into the high street, this is the view we see, with the Church just visible at the distant curve in the road.

I drew this into the last double page in my home-made sketchbook with a Uniball drawing pen. It’s funny how you only see all the glaring mistakes once you think you’ve finished and have taken the photo – the perspective error of the awning on the far left of the drawing really jumps out at me, and I realise I have omitted to complete the string of fairy lights at the top of the drawing leading from the Tavistock Inn across the road to the buildings on the other side. (Interestingly, I went to a workshop yesterday led by a local artist, Rob Dudley – see blog notes on this elsewhere – he and his wife are both well-known artists, writing often in the Artists and Illustrators Magazine amongst others. They have an agreed practice in their house, which is to prop any supposedly finished artwork up on their bookcase in the lounge, and then live with it for a few days, which he says is just perfect for helping to spot all the little imperfections – think I might need to start doing something similar…).

Generally, I am fairly pleased with the drawing; it’s a bit cramped, but then it’s a bit of a cramped, foreshortened view. Apart from the one glaring error I was reasonably happy with the perspective – I have taken the window arches of the Church as my eyeline, and have been doing bits of crafty angle checking using the edge of the page from my file.

What would I do differently another time?

• Definitely not try to do a small detailed drawing with the focus right on the fold of a double page!
• Decide when to stop – what I mean by this is that, I had decided I had finished, then at the last minute threw in details of the furthest building of the left – it is scrappy and is the bit that’s gone wrong.

I know I didn’t need to take this title literally, but…..it just so happened that, at one of our art groups, we had a workshop on making our own concertina books – so I decided to use my newly-minted product to take round and about sketching in town; it was really light, and not too conspicuous when sitting in cafes etc. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone and see if Conte crayons and charcoal were “fixed” to the page by covering them with a watercolour wash, so that one could then draw over them – so I did exactly that, scribbled randomly on all the pages and covered the scribblings with a wash before taking the book out sketching.

Results? – frankly, mixed. First of all, both the Conte crayons and the charcoal were partially fixed down with the watercolour – good to know. What I did learn was some random scribbles are better than others to draw over – horizontal lines and gentle curves (although beware curvy words – they bring their own baggage) better than strong uprights as a general rule – so, uprights ONLY if you know they’re specifically going to help a particular sketch. Also, the first time I went out I only had a biro (which I usually quite like drawing with) – but this wasn’t beefy enough to make itself felt over the underdrawing/painting – see dress shop drawing above. Second time – took a drawing pen – much better and clearer results – see church here.

I did a few sketches of the church from various angles, including from photos (it started to rain…). I especially liked the view of the tower from below, and tried quite a detailed drawing in pen…

I liked the drama of this, so I decided to use it to experiment with a different support – a sheet of newspaper painted over roughly with gesso and left overnight to dry. The newspaper was from travel supplement, and I had chosen this page as it already carried photos of large buildings; so I tried to leave gaps in the gesso here and there to see if the photos coming through would help or hinder the drawing.

I drew very quickly, simplifying the image considerably – first with tabac ink applied with a brush for the main shapes, then drawing in to this (very) wet ink straight away with a black drawing pen. The effect of this was interesting (including tearing the paper in several places) but I persisted to make sure I had strong darks where I wanted them. I think the result is quite powerful.

I tried this exercise looking through from my kitchen to the garden room, which has a tiled floor. I did stand in the centre of the doorway to look but I can see that the drawing was slightly skewed sideways because I was resting the sketchbook on a work surface by my side.

The angles of the mat were not too bad – it’s such an optical illusion, isn’t it, you look at the mat and your brain tells you it’s  a rectangular mat – so I tried to angle the lines a bit, but didn’t actually trust my measuring – a lesson there. 

The doorway again was tricky – it was actually knocked through what was originally an outer wall so it’s quite thick, and again I didn’t trust my eye with the angles. This error has then thrown out the angle of the floor tiles – but at least I was fairly consistent with them, and they nearly all met at a point (just not the point where they should have met!)

I have tried some exercises in my sketchbook to practise this skill – see A3 sketchbook. Obviously using a ruler helps enormously, and I have also tried using a pin and string (pin at the horizon line and string leading from that to indicate the angle at which to draw your line) – see earlier blog entry on a talk on Perspective by Ian Pethers.

N.B. I was also interested to stumble across the artist Fred Ingramsafter seeing an example of his work in the Telegraph (see A3 sketchbook) – I Googled him and find that a lot of his work makes a real feature of converging “parallel” lines towards the horizon – see e.g. his drawings and paintings of the Fens at www.watermarkgallery.co.uk. 

Raining again so I had a go at this exercise at art group, piling up boxes and tins from my art bag. Slightly discouraged when other members of the group went off into the mutters when they asked me what I was doing this week and I said a perspective exercise….

Attempt 1 – I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with this exercise at first, and it was only when I drew the eyeline in at the end that I could see where I had been accurate and where I was wildly out. I’d known the drawing wasn’t correct, but couldn’t see why. On the plus side…..when I sent my first assignment to my tutor, she drew lines like this all over it (a copy of it, I hasten to add!) so that I could see that my perspective had been very wide of the mark, and in several cases the continuations of my parallel lines were actually diverging, not converging – but at least I have managed to get them converging here! 

Attempt 2 – I tried from the start to be more rigorous about the relationship of length versus width in the bottom box, and this led to a more successful drawing, although the second box up is significantly wrong. I had established the eye-line in my head from the start (couldn’t quite draw it on as it was a couple of cm above the top of the page), so as I was drawing I was tweaking the angles based on the rough relative trajectory of paired parallel lines, which generally worked well except right at the end for that second box, where tweaking in one direction threw the converging of the parallel lines at right angles way out…which must mean that the right angle at the front of the picture, which I drew first and didn’t measure and check, is incorrect. Amazing how just one wrong angle can come back to haunt you…just as well I’m not an architect.

Moving forwards, though, I can see that this is a useful check to have in the arsenal, and will try to continue to use it.

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.