Back in April I decided I would like to have a go at sketching and painting. I have often thought about trying to do watercolour painting but my natural tendency towards perfectionism and my inability to carve out time for such activities has always put paid to those ideas. Back in Primary School – 50 or so years ago – I was quite into drawing and painting (without any particular flair) but in the intervening years I have hardly picked up a sketching pen or paint set. So, it was a bit of an impulse decision when I decided to work my way through a free video course on drawing and painting with ‘loose lines’ earlier this year. The course consisted of ten short videos that gave prompts to follow and, importantly, encouraged imperfection and embracing of mistakes (one of the practice tasks included instructions to deliberately make mistakes which I will admit I found hard to follow).
After just a few days of working through the course I was branching out to do more ambitious pieces and soon found myself starting to develop my own style. Since then I have been producing pictures on a fairly regular basis – mostly quick (15-30 minute), small watercolour landscapes and usually with quite a lot of detail put in with black ink. Producing these little works of art has been something I have greatly enjoyed and even though I say it myself the final pieces have been pretty good and certainly much better than I expected them to be given that I have a complete lack of technical training and zero experience to guide me. I just try things out, play and see what happens.
Over the weekend just gone I sat down for half an hour or so and decided I would have a go at producing a watercolour painting without doing what I usually do which is to first draw out the subject in a fair amount of detail in ink and then subsequently add more detail in ink on top of the paint. I have called this a ‘minimal ink’ watercolour (I did put a few small details in after I had completed the painting). I chose a photo of a stone circle on Dartmoor as my subject matter. The result is the picture at the top of this post and it is one that I am really pleased with. I am pleased with the sky as I have captured the colours and cloud shapes better than any sky I have painted previously and I am pleased with the oranges and pinks in the colour of the moorland. Most of all I am pleased that I have extended the range of my art a little more by limiting my use of ink and creating something that is a little less detailed and a little more impressionistic. It is certainly a style that I will have a go at again sometime.
When I was in Primary School I was pretty good at drawing. I remember winning a prize for an art-based project to capture a week-long residential trip we made to Tenby in South Wales and my teacher being thrilled at being able to keep a detailed pen and ink drawing I made of a monastery building in Pembrokeshire which was where she was from (Pembrokeshire that is, not the monastery). I never really got on with art at Secondary School. I think perhaps I didn’t have the patience to stick to a task long enough to turn out something worthwhile and there were 101 other things that I could be doing that grabbed my attention instead. But I have always wanted to learn to draw properly, to take up water-colour painting (perhaps not the best choice as I think it is actually one of the more difficult types of paint to use) or to have some kind of (graphic) artistic endeavour that I could lose myself in. I think I like the idea of being a wanderer, stopping here and there to whip out my art materials and conjure up a piece of magic. It’s never happened of course – life has got in the way.
My most recent attempt to get a brush-hold in the artistic world was towards the end of 2022. At a Maker Fair in South Devon in November I saw some pieces of artwork that I really liked – big abstract pastel drawings of wind-swept Dartmoor landscapes – and that led me to suggest that Father Christmas might like to give me some pastel crayons and drawing paper so that I could have a go at producing something similar. FC duly obliged and I was all geared up and ready to go…
…but time passed and, of course, it didn’t happen – life got in the way…
A couple of days ago, more than a year after I was gifted the materials, I settled myself down and had a play. I have to confess that the reason I finally got to make art that afternoon was that whilst out on a walk with my wife the day before I had been musing about how bad I am at getting myself to do the things that I say that I want to do (my self-analysis tells me that this is a combined result of three things: i) a continuous feeling of guilt that I hold inside me that there is something more important that I should be doing for someone else, ii) a ridiculously crippling tendency towards perfectionism that stops me starting things so that I don’t have to run the risk of the outcomes not being good enough and iii) the fact that my brain is always distracting itself to think about other things leaving me completely unable to decide what I will settle down to do in any given moment). My wife’s response was to suggest that we set aside the following afternoon for us both to make some art and because she had fixed that as a plan it was then possible for me to follow it through (I have no problem doing things when other people ask or tell me to do them!).
The result was that I spent a couple of hours with my little pack of pastel crayons and drawing paper and without any real idea about how to use them to best effect I just picked a photograph to base the picture on and dived in… What I discovered is that pastel crayons are a perfect medium for me to use because they seem to be very forgiving. I started with just a little colour and gradually built up the picture from the top downwards not thinking to much but just feeling what colour I would place where, how hard I would press, how much I would blend or smudge colours etc. and, amazingly, the results came out far better than I could ever have hoped. One good decision I made was to start small – with some postcard-sized paper – as this meant that I could produce a finished picture in less than an hour.
My first picture was from a photograph I took when visiting Langport in Somerset back in October. It’s a view from a bench across the River Parrett. I’ll add the photograph to the end of this post but here’s the picture that I drew:
My initial reflection was that I could have used a little more solid color but, on the other hand, I quite liked the rather sparse and washed-out look.
Having made a start with one picture I kept going, immediately setting to work on a second picture, this time a view of the Yealm Estuary near Warren Point (again, see the end of this post for the original photograph). This second picture ended up with much denser colour and if viewed from a distance almost has a photographic quality about it. The paper I used was very rough/bobbly hand-made paper which led to an interesting pointillism-like effect. I also added a few details with a fine ink pen – something that I think was only partly successful. Again, I am rather please with the result:
All of which means that I seem to have magically found myself being an artist and I am absolutely sure that it will not be long before I am having another go because I loved the deep-concentration and freedom of the process. When producing these pictures I was able to completely lose myself in the flow of the work, almost becoming part of it – in fact on reflection I would definitely say that the word art became a verb describing how I chose to spend a little piece of my life (I was ‘arting’) and not simply a noun describing the little pieces of coloured paper that I ended up with. Now I am really looking forward to seeing where this new pursuit takes me!
For completeness, here are the two photographs on which my first two pictures were based:
Tim O'Hare 