You know it’s a good day when you have time to do a sketch. After lunch I took a folding chair and sat in the shade of the Empress tree and sketched the pole building. I wanted to try a new piece of kit. I’m using a collapsible measuring cup as a water container. It works great. It’s just the right size for travel and folds flat. You can use a binder clip on the handle to hold it to your work space. I did a bit of modification on the handle. I cut it a bit shorter and I flattened it by softening it with a heat gun and pressing it between two blocks of wood.
I first took a reference photo with my iPod Touch. I then traced the building in Sketch Club with the pen tool in a separate layer and saved the sketch to the Camera Roll. I referred to the tracing while I sketched the building in my 3.5 X 5.5 inch Moleskine watercolor notebook. It helped me see the angles, proportions, and perspective.
Next I used a small, flat, chiseled brush to wet the sky and lay in a wash of blue. I then dry brushed in the green foreground and light green yellow trees. Then I added brown and brushed in the darks in the trees, windows, and shadows. I added some white back in with a white charcoal pencil around the windows and the white verticles. I used a brown gel pen to define some edges and finally I added some black with my Mars 500 pen with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black.
Draw the ordinary.
Jim
