Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Blind Touch Drawing

High Wood on a Sunny Day
Ink on Paper
28cm x 38cm (11" x 15")

Lesson 25 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is the midpoint of the book - a course of 50 lessons. 

Across the Valley
Ink on Paper
38cm x 28cm (15" x 11")

The lesson takes the Blind Drawing exercise from lesson 3 (Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Blind Drawing) one step further.

Stroking a Christmas Tree
Blind Touch Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Charcoal on Paper
22.5cm x 30cm (8.5" x 12")

In Lesson 3, you look at the subject (not the paper) while you are drawing. In the first part of lesson 25, you draw with your eyes closed. You close your eyes, touch the subject and draw what you feel, hear, smell or otherwise experience.

Bird Song and the A46 in the Distance
Blind Touch Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Charcoal on Paper
22.5cm x 30cm (8.5" x 12")

The first part of the lesson also includes an exercise to look at the landscape for 5 minutes and then draw it with your eyes shut, trying to picture the scene and using your experiences in the landscape to create an image that evokes being there.  

Across the Valley
Blind Touch Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Charcoal on Paper
30cm x 22.5cm (12" x 8.5")

The second part of the lesson is an exercise to make a series of drawings from the blind drawings “thinking about extending your mark making”. I interpreted this to mean create drawings that evoke being in the landscape using the type of marks that appear in the eyes closed exercises.

Adobe and Brick

 

Its Always Sunny
Watercolour and Charcoal on Paper
16.5cm x 22.5cm (6.5" x 8.75")

It’s always sunny in Kingswear. Whenever Elaine and I visit, we inevitably end up enjoying a drink on the Ship Inn’s patio after a long walk in the blistering sunshine. The Kingswear Hall is the other side of the road and the blue sky on a sunny day is the perfect back drop for its brickwork.

This picture was inspired by the Adobe and Brick topic in Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice and those summer evenings at the Ship Inn.

As well as taking Claudia’s advice I also revisited John Lovett’s guidance  about brickwork from his book Textures, Techniques and Special Effects for Watercolor – which is now out of print, but there is plenty of good training material on his website.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Mark Making Tools

Prussia Cove
Mark Making Tools - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic Ink on Paper
34cm x 28cm (13.5" x 11")

The exercise for Lesson 24 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is to create your own mark making tools and explore the marks they make. I score an F for this one because I didn't read the instructions properly.  I missed a couple of critical points in Philip’s explanation:

• The exercise is about making pens - not brushes
• Philip used bamboo cut from the garden as handles for his home-made pens

I used fingers, sponges, old credit cards, bits of mount board, sticks, cotton buds and spray bottles to draw instead of making them into tools because I couldn't find anything to use as handles - even though Elaine and I have bamboo bushes in our garden - doh. Then I got carried away and treated this as a painting exercise because Phillips' home made tools look more like brushes than pens.

The Old Lodge
Mark Making Tools - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic Ink on Paper
35cm x 24.75cm (13.75" x 9.75")

Never mind, I can cope with the F, I was getting bored with monochrome and I still managed to learn a bit more about mark making.

Sandstone

Carved Limestone
Watercolour and Charcoal on Paper
23.0cm x 15cm (9" x 6")

Elaine is going to make this discarded piece of carved limestone into a lampstand. I painted it in response to the Sandstone section in Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice. It may seem off topic, but some of Claudia’s examples look like limestone and I couldn’t find a good sandstone subject.

I drew it with the same charcoal pencil and drawing technique as I used in the Drawing Games exercise (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Drawing Games (Part 2)). Natural sponges helped to create the texture - they are becoming indispensable (see Volcanic Rock and Marble).

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Brush Drawing

Parkmill Pond
Brush Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Indian Ink on Paper
26cm x 20cm (10.25" x 8")

Lesson 23 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about drawing with a brush. Philip points out

Whilst one tends to think about the brush as a painting tool, Cozens, Turner and Rubens all used ink to make tonal brush drawings of landscape. You are dealing with transparency and opacity, and depending on the medium, soluble or waterproof materials.

Mousehole Harbour
Brush Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Indian Ink on Paper
25.5cm x 18cm (10" x 7")

The lesson doesn't have a clearly defined exercise, but the spirit is captured by two sentences:

By working with a single colour and investigating the potential of each implement, looking at configuration and permutation, you will build up an understanding of each implement's potential.

Experiment with combining and opposing different qualities of mark and media to describe both the texture and tone of the objects and spaces in the landscape, as well as enhance your drawings, creating both space and dynamic tension.

I worked with Indian ink and a variety of brushes including the tatty old decorating brush favoured by John Lovett.

The results are reminiscent of my drawings from lesson 18 (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Wash Media). This isn't a surprise because, basically I've repeated the exercise, but with more focus on mark making.

Woodchester Park
Brush Drawing - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Indian Ink on Paper
22cm x 15.5cm (8.75" x 6.25")

The lesson clarifies my desire to improve the quality of the individual marks I make. The chapter on Mark Making provides a framework for continual thought and practice, rather than exercises for to do once and forget about.

Marble

Marble
Watercolour on Paper
23.0cm x 14cm (9" x 5.5")

Richard Bertinet's bread recipes create a dough that is wet, sticky, and strong. When I make bread (an infrequent event), I knead the dough on this heavy marble block. If I am not careful, it ends up swinging around the kitchen on the end of a doughy bungee cord. 

The picture is inspired by the Marble topic in the Earth Textures chapter of Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice.

Claudia's marble examples are more veined than this, she uses rubbing alcohol to create the distinctive marbling patterns in the watercolour washes. We don't have any rubbing alcohol lying around the house and I was unsure whether gin, beer or wine would serve as the best alternative. I used a natural sponge instead (see Volcanic Rock). This is my favourite painting tool of the moment.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Drawing Games (Part 2)

 

Woodchester Park Boathouse
Drawing Games - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Charcoal Pencil on Paper
30.5cm x 21.5cm (12" x 8.5")

This is the second instalment of my drawings from Lesson 22 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler..

The “game” for these drawings was inspired by a lesson from John Lovett about Drawing, Sketching and Scribbling. 

For this game, I used a charcoal pencil - a medium I do not normally use. I held the pencil further back from the point than usual and as though I had just picked it up from the desk - rather than using the normal tripod writing grip. These changes allow you to make more fluid marks by drawing from the shoulder instead of the wrist and to easily switch between using the very tip of the pencil and the side of the lead. The new grip initially felt clumsy, but John’s premise is that confidence and conviction are more important than accuracy.

One of the most important aspects of drawing is confidence. Make your marks with conviction and don't be too concerned with accuracy. It is much better to have a clean, confident mark in the wrong place than a timid, overworked line in the right place.

The picture at the top of the post is the boathouse in Woodchester park. I think it featured in some episodes of the Crown as the boathouse at Gordonstoun, but I can’t say for sure.

Winery Barns
Drawing Games - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Charcoal Pencil on Paper
30.5cm x 21.5cm (12" x 8.5")

These are some barns at one of the wineries in Niagara on the Lake. I think it was Iniskillin, but I took the photo in 2011, so I can’t be sure about this either.

Digger Graveyard
Drawing Games - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Charcoal Pencil on Paper
30.5cm x 21.5cm (12" x 8.5")

There is a digger graveyard in our local woods. These are the two latest arrivals. They seem much younger than the other residents. I was hoping they were just on holiday, but things were looking bleak because they hadn’t moved for weeks. Even Doris seemed worried about them. They just sat there slowly seizing up and rusting. Until yesterday. They’ve started to do some digging and it looks like they are trying to tidy the place up a bit. Happy Days.