Welcome to the blog. On the this site you will find recent sketches right through to truely terrible sketches made on location over 20 years ago. Looking back at those sketches I sometimes wonder why I even continued with the practice! So why do I sketch? Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Alon...
It's all thanks to the The Grey Book which forces you to lay down lights on the grey paper page first.
When
it works well it helps to short-cut the dreaded 'pencil first' tendency
that tries to sneak in from time to time. The looser the initial
white is - the better the sketch turns out - and the pencil doesn't
even get a look in.
The
old Victorian houses in Albany Road, Ponsonby are perfect for trialing the technique and it makes the decorative white fretwork stand out nicely.
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