Holiday Drawings - Lancaster

At the end of October my family and I stayed in Lancaster for a few days to visit my brother at university. We stayed on a lovely wooded campsite and went on some equally lovely walks while we there. I did a painting on each of the two walks we went on and it was really fun for me because I have hardly ever painted outside before. Before recently I had felt too self conscious to draw in public and it was only after visiting the Manchester Costume Gallery in August and sketching some of the exhibits while I was there that I have felt confident enough to draw in public - I have been loving it since!

The first painting I did was of a rather cool-looking tree at the edge of a lake that we passed on one of our walks. For this, I tried adding more texture with my pencil marks than I normally do. It ended up being a very quick painting because it started to rain, meaning I had to stop sooner than I planned, but I still quite like the result.

The second painting I did was on a lovely walk straight from the campsite we were staying on. My Dad, sister and I had walked down to a really nice spot at the edge of a river and the sun was shining through the trees so they were glowing and reflecting beautifully on the stream. So basically I HAD to paint it.

I managed to get my sketch done and I had put most of my paint down when a rather large bug landed on my page. It made me jump and I proceeded to throw my sketchbook straight into the river I was painting. So you can imagine that this painting session also ended very abruptly. I was upset at the time because I thought my sketchbook and all the paintings in it would be ruined. Luckily they were all fine and I ended up finishing the painting off later with a black pen. Normally I try to avoid outlining landscapes in black, but with this one I was stuck for ideas and very frustrated. The black outline was a fairly desperate attempt to make it worthwhile me throwing my sketchbook into a river and I think it just about worked.

Inktober 2015

This October, I decided to try and take part in Inktober- try is the keyword here. I have followed Inktober on Instagram for a while now as many of my favourite artists and illustrators have participated before and I thought it looked like a great challenge to do.

Unfortunately, I only managed 2 ink pieces out of 31. I think this is largely due to Inktober falling in the first term of my A-Levels and my first term at college meaning work is taking my full focus. Also, I would say that I was unprepared for the challenge as originally I had not planned to take part, in fact it was only after being inspired by other people’s ink pieces that I decided it looked like too much fun to miss. I ended up starting about five days into October.

Here are the two paintings I managed:

Despite Inktober not going as I wished, I am still very happy that I tried. It was great for me to experiment with ink- a medium I do not often turn to and I am pleased with the two paintings I did create. Now I know that when taking part in Inktober and similar challenges again in the future it is a great idea to plan. Next time I would definitely write a list beforehand of what I will draw each day as finding time to make art everyday is hard enough without having to come up with 31 new ideas.

If all goes to plan I will be participating in Inktober next year and I will definitely be better prepared after this year’s attempt. As for now, I'm planning some sort of Christmas themed advent drawing challenge for December and I can’t wait!

Thanks for reading! 

Dahlia

This painting was pretty much entirely inspired by a dahlia from my garden. It is painted in gouache with some details in coloured pencil.

This was the original design from my sketchbook. I was working in an A2 size which is rare for me, but it was a nice challenge to have a bigger working area and to include a background. 

Here is a picture of it in progress. I had done the base layers for the background and was just starting to fill in the figure. I decided to go with a warmer pink shadow of the skin instead of the purple I sometimes use and I think it works really well with the overall colour scheme.

And the finished piece! I'm really happy with how it turned out and I can see myself working in this size again. In total it took me two full days to paint and it was really fun.

These are some of my favourite details, I love the texture of the pencil crayon on the gouache. I think it works really nicely. 

Thanks for reading!