Saturday, 28 November 2015

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.






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