Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Copying Others

 

Allotment Shed
Copying Others - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Ink on Paper
14cm x 18cm (5.5" x 7")

Lesson 28 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about learning from the mark making of other artists. It is the last lesson in the Mark Making chapter.

Phillip provides a list of artists. He suggests studying their mark making and comparing the marks in their drawings with the marks in their paintings.  He also recommends copying excerpts from their drawings.

Excerpt from Six's Bridge by Rembrandt
Copying Others - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Ink on Paper
14cm x 14cm (5.5" x 5.5")

Rembrandt is the first artist on the list. I studied as many of his drawings and etchings as I could find, copied an excerpt from one of them and then drew a picture of my own. I didn't try to imitate Rembrandt's marks. I was interested in whether my subconscious would  be influenced by the recent scrutiny of his drawings.  

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I haven’t studied the work of an artist in this way since the Analysis of Reproductions and Composition from Reproductions exercises from The Natural Way to Draw. It is something I enjoy doing and should do more regularly, but there is always something more pressing to do. Maybe I will set a goal to study the drawings of an artist from Philip's list each month.

There is a rookie mistake in the drawing of sheds. One of the fence posts touches and lines up exactly with the edge of the leaning door. This unintentional alignment creates a long jarring diagonal line. It happened because I didn’t do any preliminary setup. I just started drawing and was concentrating more on mark making than composition. Just goes to show – you always have to be thinking about the bigger picture.

Cumulus Clouds

Along the Valley
Watercolour on Paper
16.5cm x 12cm (6.5" x 4.75")

Cumulus Clouds is the first topic in the Skies and Weather chapter of Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice.

Across the Valley
Watercolour on Paper
12cm x 16.5cm (4.75" x 6.5")

Claudia uses a wet-on-wet approach in her examples. I painted lots of skies - there were plenty of disasters and these are my favourites. I used to prefer painting skies on dry paper (see Lake District Sky Studies) because it is more controlled, but with a bit of practice (and patience), wet-on-wet seems a better technique for painting fluffy clouds. It is important not to rush in while the paper is soaking. You need to wait until the paper is beginning to dry and not to be too precious about painting exactly the clouds you can see – I ended up aiming for atmosphere not accuracy.