SUMMER Term week 7
Date: 6th & 5th June. Kingsbridge: Tuesday sessions transferred to Thursday, for this week only.
Tutor: Rob and Siân
Free Painting
what to bring
Bring along your usual painting materials. It will be useful to have a sketchpad or some rough paper on which you can draw/make notes.
weekly sketching challenge
Try sitting in a corner of your garden, or looking out of the window if it is raining, and find an area that looks complicated and overwhelming.
Now think “What do I want to include in this sketch?” Just draw those bits. Just those. Ignore the rest.
THIS Week:
This week will be a free painting session.
Last updated 3.6.24 Spain 2025
Sketch of the Week
Reason for making the drawing.
I was preparing for a painting of flowers in a glass jug.
Materials
3B pencil, sketch book, eraser.
Mark-Making
This sketch required clear, clean lines. Texture was unimportant. Only a small area was shaded to imply particularly dark area of tone. Otherwise tone was indicated by the weight of the pencil line.
Particular Focus.
I am fascinated by the way stems can appear to be completely disjointed when viewed through water and glass. I wanted to record this carefully, hence the need for clean, crisp lines. Note how the stems not only appear to be ‘broken’, but they also do not touch the bottom of the jug.
As an aside, there is evidence here of how recording information is far more important that the quality of the drawing. You can see plenty of rubbing out lines, and if you look carefully you will see a second drawing higher up the page that has been rubbed out. No-one else was ever intended to see this, the scruffiness did not matter. It was the observation that mattered.
Siân
Flower stems in a glass jug.
Quote of the week
‘Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.
David Hockney.
ArTIST of the week
Ken Howard RA
Inspired by Light: A personal View
Chapter 1 : Drawing: A Way of Seeing
‘It (drawing) is a tool that can help the artist to understand a subject. …But the most important reason for drawing is that it forces you to analyse the subject for yourself. You might be inspired by a particular subject, but until you start to draw it you cannot hope to understand it fully, and I have never met an accomplished painter who cannot draw well.’ (p10)
What else can we say? If you still have doubts about the value of drawing this book will dispel them.
Do take time to look at this book this week, in particular chapter 1, even if it just to read the captions under the images.
Ken Howard has a lovely phrase he uses to describe some of the marks he makes while sketching. He calls them ‘think lines’.
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