My drawings and throughts as I work through the third course in the series.

First Sketch: Beach Sunset.

Im jumping about a bit here. Our local art club has a 2 hour 'do your own thing' on some Fridays, so I thought I would take along the intro sketch to do. I wanted try something a bit different with this by breaking up the colours a bit.
For some reason I used a piece of light grey paper out of my 'box' for this - I'm not sure it was the best choice as I found it hard to really make the colours vibrant (lesson learned there). I think pearlescent or white might have been better.  

 

Sunset over the Beach drawing:

I made a start on this. Somewhere near the end of session 8 and about to start session 9 to add colour.
The transcript and much of the audio seems to be missing for session 9 :-/
- easy enough to follow along though.

 

First pass of the sky:
trying to capture something of 'Sunset over the Sea', Eugene Boudin.

 

PS. I have a question: A number of people have asked me about the drawing courses (Drawing and sketching and Impressionist drawing) I have been doing. It is ok to share my versions of the drawings on a blog/social media ? Obviously crediting reference picture originator and linking the course?

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A bit more colour work on the Sunset over the sea. I found the references to Eugene Boudin and Claude Monet paintings of Sunset over the Sea very interesting. So tempted to put some little sailing boats in like the Monet painting. :-)
I'm not sure if I have finished this or not. Will look at it again at the weekend.

 

 

PS: I had some issues with the voice-over on sessions 11 and 12 - Video ok but no voice or transcript from half way.

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Final version Sunset over the Beach:

I decided not to play with adding little boats in the water.
A few tweaks to the picture:
- slight outline to the little flowers with indigo pencil
- some darker patches of grass, in particular near the grass roots - indigo
- I blended some of the over-gritty cloud patches with a white pencil to reduce the contrast a bit
- tidy up of the beach edges
- digital frame...

I noticed that some of my pictures were not showing (Especially on the app). It seems that there is a maximum file size for them to be rendered properly. I re-posted some of them to 2000px on the longest side.

The sea is a bit 'turquoise' and I thought about darkening it down a bit - in particular near the horizon. In the end I decided I quite liked it. mmmh - maybe....
Ooops looks like I forgot the sun rays through the gaps in the clouds too.

I had a lot of fun with this. It made me feel like I needed to go to the beach more often:

 

I darkened the horizon line (dark turquoise) and drew a few sun rays in the cloud gaps (light yellow). Might not show on here, but it made a subtle difference.

 

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 Onwards to the house next - it looks amazing ...

A Sunset with a Typical Cabourg House:

I made a start. Somewhere near the beginning of session 14.

I have some perspective errors to sort out soon, in particular the roof line, but I think everything is there and in the right place. The house is starting to appear :-) 

 

 A bit more progress on the house...
Somewhere in sessions 15 and 16.
- Im not sure I chose the right colour for the roof  - I might need to tone that down a bit.
- Im not  sure what the reflective panels on the left attached to the house behind the bush are. Panelled room or glass wind break ? As the setting sun is behind the building, the house must be facing north, maybe towards the sea - hence a screen of some kind.  Im not sure they are an important part of the picture, so I might change them into a brick wall or a wooden fence.
- Ive yet to sort out in my head what to do about the foliage growing up the building near the door.

The house is picture is starting to develop 'out of the mist' from yesterday.

a bit more progress today although slowly with the cobbles and foilage. I still haven't worked out what I woul dliek to do with the creeper on the front of the house yet.
I did decided that I did not want to include the glass screens/ greenhouse on the  left in the end and made up some woodwork to replace them. I also included a few personal touches - :-)  :-)  a little bit of homage to Edward Hopper :-).

There still seems masses to do including strengthening all the pigment I managed to smudge all over myself - and of course the sky.

 

 

A Bit More Progress on Sunset and House in Cabourg

I carried on with this piece last night and probably went a bit further than I should have. I was tired and, quite late on, realised I’d spent nearly an hour fussing with the sky — without making much visible progress. That was my cue to stop.

Looking at the photo I took this morning, I’ve noticed a few little details I could tidy up, but overall I think this lovely scene is nearly finished. I tried to keep in mind that this topic was about creating a luminous sky, so I worked plenty of pastel into the sky area to really saturate the paper. Hopefully, I’ve done the theme some justice.

I really like this picture, and I learned a lot while drawing it. Over the past week, I’ve found myself constantly looking up when I go outside — trying to understand more about how clouds form and move across the sky.

Once the weather allows, I’ll get the fixative on and frame it. Then it’ll go up on my “trophy wall” at home, alongside other drawings from this series of courses. It’s raining today, so that part may have to wait — but the framed version is coming soon.

nearly finished .... maybe.....

Final version:

The weather cleared well enough to get some fixer on - so here it is looking splendid on my home wall :-)