A Week of Sketches

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This week I’ve been exploring additional ways to sketch and paint directly without doing any underdrawing first. It’s harder to do, but it is quicker and it produces a livelier sketch. It’s tricky to get a good result because you have to develop the composition and layout as you go instead of planning it out ahead of time and it is quicker because you are leaving out a step. As with anything, the more you practice the better you get.

One way to sketch directly is to use watercolor with a brush. I tried that first in my own backyard.

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I worked in three passes. First I sketched the lightest colors and let that dry. Then I defined the shapes with midtone colors. Finally I added in some black with a brush pen.

Strathmore 400 Series Watercolor paper 5.5×8.5 inches (14×21.6 cm), 5/8 inch filbert brush, Chinese medium round brush, medium round waterbrush filled with water, medium round waterbrush filled with Kaweco Smokey Grey ink, Kuretake #13 fountain brush pen with Platinum Carbon Black ink, and Daniel Smith watercolors. Image is 3.5×6.5 inches (9×16.5 cm).

That same day I sat down near the back porch and sketched directly with brush pens instead of watercolor on a larger piece of paper.

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I started on the left drawing the porch roof first. I didn’t get the angles right, but with pen and ink you can’t go back and make corrections. If you want accuracy, do an underdrawing because you can make corrections before you commit to ink. Again my strategy was to work from light to dark, left to right with each of the three values. The advantage of using brush pens is that the ink drys faster than watercolor. So, you can do a larger drawing in the same amount of time. The disadvantage is that you only have a set number of colors to work with and you have more to carry. My set has 24 pens. The colors don’t mix and spread as nicely as watercolors. You end up with hard edges and solid colors. I was able to soften some of the edges by adding plain water with a waterbrush.

Strathmore 400 Series Mixed Media 9×12 inch (23×30.5 cm) paper, Arteza Real Brush pens.

On Wednesday I went to Riverfront park. I wanted to sketch from the same location using four different media – Expo Vis-a-Vis Wet-Erase markers, Faber-Castell PITT Artist pens, Neocolor II watersoluble crayons, and Kuretake Brushables pens – and compare them. I worked small – 5×7 inches. Click the thumbnails to see larger versions.

The first sketch I did with the Wet-Erase pens. The colors were limited and not really to my liking, but I liked how I could pull color off the lines and create washes with plain water in a waterbrush. I also tried using spherical perspective where lines become more curved the closer you get to the edges.

The second sketch I did with PITT Artist pens. Again I used spherical perspective. PITT ink is waterproof. So, I couldn’t pull color off the line like I did with the Wet-Erase pens. I used the edge of the pen tip to block in some color in the foreground shadows. I drew with the green pen first and then played with the rest of the colors using orange and red for the figures, magenta for the background foliage, yellow for the sunlit areas, and blue for the shadows.

Next, I turned around and sketched the scene behind me with Neocolor II watersoluble crayons. These created variegated linework compared to the hard edged ink sketches. Again I started with green, then orange and red, and finally blue for the shadows. I then came in with a waterbrush and tried pulling color off the lines like I did with the Wet-Erase pen sketch. The color doesn’t run as much as with the Wet-Erase pens and has a subtler, dreamier effect.

Finally I sketched with Kuretake Brushables pens. They are waterproof like the PITT pens. However they don’t come in as many colors as the PITT pens. Each Brushables pen comes with two tips – one at each end. One tip is a lighter value of the same color at the other end. If you look closely, you can see I used both the lighter and darker values of the green and orange pens. Also the brush tips on the Brushables are larger than the PITT pen tips. You can get a wider range of line width with the Brushables. I used purple for the shadows to get a wider range of values, and I tried using a rough form of stippling to fill in the blank spaces. I used standard perspective on this one so I could have something to compare with the spherical perspective.

The PITT pens came closest to my fulfilling my wish list. I learned from this experiment that what I really wanted was to carry and use a limited set of waterproof pens with vibrant colors. The PITT inks were nice, but I wondered what else was out there. So, on my way home I stopped at Walmart and bought a set of Sharpie Fine Point pens. The next day I tested them in a small sketchbook in my living room.

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I like the rich colors. The only disadvantage is they bleed through the paper a bit and show on the other side. The picture is 3.5×10 inches. I used 8 colors starting with orange then brown, yellow, green, violet, blue, red, and black in that order. It is quite a challenge to draw directly with each color one after the other. You have to look at the whole scene and judge placement and scale as you go. I used the width of the front door as my unit of measure. There are roughly three door widths to the right and left of the front door. The doorknobs, are in the vertical middle of the scene. The top of the chair and table are a little lower than the doorknobs. I stuck with a basic two point perspective on this one instead of trying spherical perspective.

On Saturday morning I joined the Salem Sketchers at EZ Orchards Market. I brought with me my Sharpie pens and a small palette of Daniel Smith watercolors and a waterbrush and two pads of watercolor paper – one 5.5×8 inches and the other 9×12. I warmed up by sketching a small tractor in the kid’s playground.

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I started out with black and red ballpoint pens to layout the basic shapes of the tractor. I don’t know why I did that seeing how my goal for the last two weeks has been to draw directly without an underdrawing. I realized my mistake and drew again with the Sharpie pens, black and red. Next I used grey ink in a waterbrush to paint in the greys and black ink in a brush fountain pen to do the blacks. Finally I added some green and red watercolor. It was a good warmup before tackling a more ambitious interior sketch.

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The market was crowded with lots of Saturday morning customers. I found a corner behind the cash registers where I could stand and sketch and not be in the way. I sketched for about a half hour on the larger paper of paper. I had all eight of the Sharpie pens in my shirt pocket so I could easily switch between them. I started with the hanging lights and then used them to position the other objects in the scene. People were moving fast. It was difficult to capture exact shapes so I roughly indicated size and position instead. The last thing I did was to splash in some watercolor with a waterbrush.

Strathmore 400 Series Mixed Media 9×12 inch (23×30.5 cm) paper, Sharpie Fine Point markers, Daniel Smith watercolors with Caran D’Ache round waterbrush. Image is 7×10 inches (18×25.5 cm).

Afterwards we met and showed our sketches. The owner of the market came out to see and liked my sketch of the interior of the market. So, I went home, scanned the sketch and printed it on the same watercolor paper and at the same size as the original, drove back over to the market and hand delivered the print to the owner. You should have seen the smile on his face. Made my day.

Jim