Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Making a Mess

 

Messy Tree
Making a Mess - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Water-Soluble Graphite, Ink and Watercolour on Paper
18cm x 26cm (10" x 7")

Making a Mess is Lesson 20 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler

The instructions are to reach for any tool in your art bin and using scraps of paper, try to make a mess. Phillip urges us to be playful and to fill pages with as many different marks as we can without worrying about the results. 

I used a variety of tools - focussing on graphite and charcoal because I used ink for the grid exercise (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape - A Grid).

The biggest revelation was the fun you can have with water-soluble graphite. It lends itself to messiness and gets all over your hands. You can draw with it and then add water to create washes. I used a block called ArtGraf Tailor Shape. The manufacturer says:

Inspired by traditional tailor's chalk, ArtGraf Tailor Shape is a rich, water-soluble block of pigment. It is extremely soft and provides artists with a wide range of shades depending on the amount of water used, from light, transparent tones to deep, rich, opaque colours. When diluted, the Tailor's Shape acts similarly to an ink, it can also be used dry as a drawing medium by itself. It can be used as an entire block to draw or paint with or colour can be picked up from the block with a brush, similarly to how you would use traditional watercolour paint. (see https://www.viarco.pt/en/artgraf-products/).

I bought a block from Jacksons (see https://www.jacksonsart.com/viarco-artgraf-tailor-shape-watersoluble-black-carbon)

The picture at the top of the post is my favourite of the experiments and these are a few more from the pile.

This is the sort of exercise I need to incorporate into my regular practice. If I don’t feel like drawing, but I have a few minutes, I can experiment with mark making.

Gravel

Gravel
Ink and Watercolour
Stillman & Birn Alpha Series Sketchbook
20.3cm x 14.0cm (8.0" x 5.5")

Gravel is the third topic in the Earth Textures chapter of Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice.

I struggled to find inspiring reference images of gravel. Am I odd? Does everyone else have albums full of their favourite gravel photographs? Claudia included drawings of small stones in her gravel drawings, so I took the  same approach. While I was drawing these stones, I realised how much I enjoy and miss detailed observation. I plan to do more over the next few weeks.

Hurlstone Point from Porlock Weir
Watercolour and Ink on Paper
21.5cm x 13.0cm (8.5" x 5")

The one photo of gravel I found is this view of Hurlstone Point from Porlock Weir. I've posted pictures of this view before (see The View From Porlock Weir). I prefer the colours in those earlier paintings, but I quite like the gravel in this one.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – A Grid

A Grid - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Ink on Paper
21cm x 21cm (8.25" x 8.25")

Chapter 5 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about mark making. The instructions for Lesson 19 (the first lesson in the chapter) are to draw a 20cm by 20cm grid and fill each box with a different set of marks. Philip observes “At first it will be easy but as you continue to fill the 400 boxes, you will probably begin to repeat yourself.” 

I usually use fineliners for drawing - these are pens with a plastic or fine fibre needle-point tip. They are easy to use and available with various tip sizes. During the exercise, I used various fineliner, brush, fountain and dip pens. It struck me that pen with nibs and brushes are more interesting to use than fineliners. With a nib or a brush, you can alter the mark by playing with the orientation of the pen and the amount of pressure you apply. If you press hard on a fineliner, you don’t achieve much other than knackering the tip.