Travelling sketchbook - beach treasure from Carrick

The sketchbook pages that I was gifted this month riffed off a lovely purple. A royal purple. An incredibly expensive purple, Tyrian purple, a mucous secretion from a humble snail.

I had read about this in Victoria Finlay's wonderful book, Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox. So I started to think about shells and colour. My favourite chapter in the same book had been about the harvesting of lapis lazuli from mysterious caves in remote Afghanistan. We were off to Carrick, in Dumfries and Galloway for New Year and my thoughts were dragged off to the blue hues of the mussel shells that pile up on the beaches there, washed in on rough tides or deposited by gulls after a good feed.

When I looked closely at the real thing, the detail of their patterns amazed me, and I recorded their shapes and colours.

 I tried to use some Transfer Artist Paper to print some of my photographs of shell patterns onto paper, so that I could use them as part of a beach collage, but the printer decided to smear ink all over itself and not on the TAP (what did I do wrong,??), so I was left with no more than a couple of quite atmospheric textural smudges that I ironed onto my paper anyway (see lower picture above), that looked a bit like the kind of silt that gets washed up on beaches.

So I had to find something else to collage mussel shapes from and, surprise, surprise, some Gelli plate cast-offs came galloping to the fore again. Yet another reminder never to throw anything vaguely half-decent away...

I wanted to show the shine of a beach in the low sun of a winter afternoon so I experimented with watercolours overlaid with various pearlescent paints and glitters, to see which sparkled most convincingly and ended up with an amalgam of silvers and golds that seemed to work.

If in doubt, I'm trying to remember to have a good old splash about, as long as it's in my 'back book'. After all, that's what it's for. Not only am I not committed to the final piece, but it gives me my workings in a place that I can annotate.

So the piece that I'm passing on is a landscape version of my back book piece, my take on a chilly afternoon in the January sunshine, beachcombing, finding treasure.

Dumfries and Galloway was flooded over New Year.

It was never clear whether we would be marooned each morning that we woke up. But Carrick's completely unspoiled, windswept and beautiful beach never ceased to be an inspiration.

Travelling sketchbook - chomping fieldfares & Mark Hearld:

Again from M, I received a lovely couple of pages of very evocative feather designs and I was immediately off into the realm of birds again.

I spend the summer fervently hoping that our crab apple tree would have lots of pendulous ripe red fruits, as come winter, migrating fieldfares take up residence in from the fields on the very coldest of days and sit there until they've greedily chomped through the lot! Usually the tree is finally bare just after Christmas.

A December feather subject could not have come and gone without these characters making it onto my sketchbook pages.

As I thought about portly birds in wintery treetops, I recalled that the wonderful Mark Hearld has lots of work involving birds and the landscape and so I turned to his gorgeously produced book, called Mark Hearld's Work Book, to reacquaint myself with his subjects and just how he puts them together for maximum effect. The more I looked, the cleverer I realised he is.

Mark Hearld

For example, as above, I love the way the main subject takes your eye, despite all the other seemingly busy competing elements. The way your eye travels round the picture, taking everything in. The delightful positive and negative elements, just thrown in so you hardly notice them unless you look carefully, but which add so much richness to the whole. It was thrilling to keep looking.

What could I possibly learn when I was just dipping in and out? The more I looked the more I realised that something so apparently effortless is anything but. Of course.

And the above is a print, so doesn't even take account of Mark's frequent use of very varied collaged elements that I always find so exciting.

Anyway, back to my fieldfares. I had a bit of a draw of one and in my sketchbook had a little 'first thought' at a composition.

 

In fact I realised that a 'Mark Hearld' was out of the question. I just didn't have the skill to combine anything like as many elements. So I decided to keep it simple and anyway, I had started snipping tree branches out of a discarded gelli plate print that had just got too dark, but which I couldn't quite bear to throw away. You know the story..

And I quite liked the emerging texture, with bronze lights that I hadn't even considered, until there they suddenly were. I laid them out.

And I realised that with a gentle background, a cheeky fieldfare and some berries, that would be what I wanted. That would be enough.

This is what I passed on to the next person.

The background was just some watercolour swirling, using a couple of colours. After some further immersion into the World of Hearld, the fieldfare was collaged from scraps following my earlier sketch, the breast was a paper leftover with some Inktense pencil marks, some of the marks made into dampened paper. The eye was a couple of glued-on sequins, so that it had a catchlight. And the berries were plops of vibrant watercolour.

It's amazing just how much thinking and mulling I do to get to a pretty simple result. But I think for me it's all about gentle visual problem-solving, play, which takes some pressure off.

Travelling sketchbook - little green apples

The next travelling sketchbook pages I received were a marvellous confection of silver and golden apples and a Yeats poem to match from M.

Our own apple trees were already spilling fruit from a hugely plentiful summer and as we picked and crushed and bottled, I thought about how much the crop changes throughout the year and the progression of gorgeous colours as it all matures and ripens and....drops.

I don't know why, but I liked the idea of colour spilling over edges when I started. Maybe that freshness got a bit lost.

But again I started with texture. I built up some Liquitex Matte Gel, but it took a lot of layers before it got anything like yummy enough with a few peaks and troughs. I was intending to draw with Inktense pencils over the top and then swirl around some water, to let it settle in valleys, so I did need the odd valley! It also required a few layers of gesso over the top to make it interesting enough.

This was my first attempt.

Nice textures, but it did all look a bit bare. I suddenly remembered my trusty stack of paper napkins and wondered about introducing some background colour (I collaged on just the top layer of 3- or 4-ply napkins, pasted on with acrylic medium, which you can then work over with other paints, pencils etc).

I wanted to echo the 'through the seasons' look of the apples.

This was what I passed on to the next person.

Travelling sketchbook - a bubblewrap special

Next, I received an image of a raptor with a very beady eye from E in the Travelling Sketchbook circus.

That eye transfixed me and the tissue paper-layered feathers made me think first of a caveman's pelt.
Ooh, some kind of deep texture.

Then at home I spied some bubblewrap, just hangin'....with sunlight glinting through it, and I was off on eskimos and ice. Amazing what connections our brains make. Just catching those micro thoughts as they speed past is the tricky bit, I think.

So I started to play.

The bubblewrap looked like bubbles in frozen ice. Particularly with some marbled paper that I once did, tucked behind it.

The 'pools' are some Procion MX dyed paper. It can give such lovely deep colour.

Big bubblewrap or small....? In many ways, I liked the big bubbles better as they seemed less uniform and therefore had more energy. But they really bulked out the sketchbook (curses!).

I realised that all that ice was making me feel a bit scared and I tracked it to a feeling of nagging fear at being trapped.

I added some eyes. Maybe they were always in my mind from my first response to the bird that came my way as my inspiration image. I got even more scared when I saw that little face, trapped not far, but in the end too far from the waterhole.

I needed something a bit gentler colourwise though, I thought. So I dialled back on the marbled paper to a calmer selection of colours.

But those terrified eyes still stared from under the thick, unyielding ice.....