Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Glazing (Part 2)

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Glazing describes my initial experiences with Lesson 43 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler. It explains how I tried to paint this scene using watery washes of acrylic. My first effort was garish and after that they became uglier and uglier. After many attempts, I accepted the need to try something different, so I went back to Phillip’s suggestion of painting over an existing study – which is a much better way to get started.

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Initial Underpainting

I painted this monochrome underpainting (a grisaillle) using Payne's Grey and Titanium White. I then adjusted the picture using a mixture of layering and glazing. If the tone needed to change (like in the sky or extreme foreground), I glazed over it with a semi-transparent layer. If the underlying shapes (like the foreground slope) needed to change, I obscured the original with an opaque layer. 

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Refined Underpainting

After refining the study, I glazed over it with colour. This worked a lot better than my previous attempt at using an underpainting technique (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Underpainting).

By painting this image repeatedly for months, I’ve learnt more about handling acrylic paint, but at the expense of letting my compositional skills atrophy. I need to focus on quantity not quality of paintings for a while because each time you finish a painting, you’ve gone through the whole process from finding a subject and creating a composition all the way through to finishing the painting. This helps to improves all your skills - not just one of them. There is evidence that if you focus on quantity, quality begins to take care of itself.

The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 2 (Take 3)

Narcissus - Common Daffodil
The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 2
Ink on Paper
23cm x 15cm (9" x 6")

This is my third go at Exercise 2 from John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing (see The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 2 and The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 2 (Take 2)). I repeated the exercise as I worked on exercises 3 (The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 3) and 4. I followed the same steps as in my previous attempts:

Chose an illustration from British Phænogamous Botany; Or, Figures and Description of The Genera of British Flowering Plants. 

Narcissus - Common Daffodil

Copied the outline as closely as possible with a soft pencil on to a piece of scrap paper. 

Narcissus - Common Daffodil
The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 2
Pencil on Paper
23cm x 15cm (9" x 6")

Used Gimp (a free image editing package) to compare my drawing (in red) with the original. This is the most complex example I've tried. The comparison identified the need for more significant alterations than in my previous attempts.

Assessing Outline 1

Corrected my outline (by eye) based on the comparison. 

Made another comparison and repeated the correct and compare steps until I reached a reasonable level of accuracy (this is my sixth and final version). 

Assessing Outline 6

Transferred my drawing to a clean piece of paper (using a lightbox) and then drew over it in ink (the outline at the top of the post is the result).

I still can’t get on with Ruskin’s suggestion for the last step:

rest your hand on a book about an inch and a half thick, so as to hold the pen long; and go over your pencil outline with ink, raising your pen point as seldom as possible, and never leaning more heavily on one part of the line than on another.

I can’t draw with any fluidity while resting my hand on a book. Instead, I don’t rest my hand on anything. I try to hold the pen (a fineliner) so that it barely touches the paper and then draw from my shoulder while maintaining the slow control that Ruskin demands – its tricky.

The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 3

The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 3
Ink on Paper
10cm x 18cm (4" x 7")

Exercise 3 from John Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing is an extension to Exercise 1.

Ruskin says:

"As soon as you find you have some command of the pen as a shading instrument, and can lay a pale or dark tint as you choose, try to produce gradated spaces like Fig. 2"

The Elements of Drawing - Exercise 3

The instructions are 

"Draw, therefore, two parallel lines for limits to your work, and try to gradate the shade evenly from white to black, passing over the greatest possible distance, yet so that every part of the band may have visible change in it."

My lines were wobbly because I drew them free hand, without flattening the page - which was a mistake. The exercise would be easier with properly straight and parallel lines. After that, the exercise went  smoothly. One skill I improved was my ability to remove ink using 

"the edge of your penknife very lightly, and for some time,"

During Exercise 1, I was scratching the paper which made adding more ink difficult. In this exercise, I managed to scrape off ink without creating any noticeable damage. It seemed like I could have carried on for a lot longer adding and removing ink. Eventually, I stopped because I couldn’t tell whether I was improving the gradations or making them worse.

Ruskin says

"The perception of gradation is very deficient in all beginners (not to say, in many artists), and you will probably, for some time, think your gradation skilful enough, when it is quite patchy and imperfect."

He emphasizes: 

"Nearly all expression of form, in drawing, depends on your power of gradating delicately"

And suggests

"look for gradated spaces in Nature. …

At last, when your eye gets keen and true, you will see gradation on everything in Nature."