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...
Spring has sprung in New Zealand and along with spring comes Daylight Savings Time which means a whole lot more time to sketch. This post however focusses on sketching through the long, wet and gloomy last 3 months of winter!
The great thing about Auckland is it doesn't get so cold that all sketching is impossible, but you do need to be a bit strategic in your approach.
For me winter is a strange time because it's also my busiest time at work (that other thing that pays most of the bills). Strangely though I seem to ramp up the sketching though winter, determined to sketch as much as possible.
Why? Because sketching is a little like playing a musical instrument or training for a marathon - the saying 'use it you lose loose it' applies here. It's so important to keep your hand-eye coordination going, and also to get out into the world with a sketchbook rather than hibernating at home.
So this winter I started with a loose plan. The plan was to take a small sketchbook and VERY simple sketch tools with me every day – and just see what happens.
The French Art Shop kindly put on a 'try-out' session for Urban Sketchers Auckland and this is where I discovered Zig brush pens. Brush pens and I have never got on well in the past but I seem to really enjoy them now, especially applying them over blocks of colour, they aren't waterproof so this step is pretty important.
Rather than taking my big bag of materials out and lavishing an hour or so on a sketch, having simple tools meant I had my gear with me most of the time. My limited materials included an A6 Stillman & Birn Nova sketchbook, the Zig brush pen mentioned earlier and a chunky Posca marker (or two) to use as a spot colour.
The results were interesting. The brush pen added a whole new character to the sketches and the small sketchbook size and reduced colour palette made it super easy to create lots of quick sketches, and the sketches are more graphic, so in a way giving more bang for your buck!
So my advice is Keep It Simple Sketcher – don't give up sketching for the winter – just keep it simple and carry and go for it.
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