The painting that showed me that I could draw!!!!
A painting from Mount Road in my sketchbook from 2018 was the first drawing I came back to the next day and realised I could draw.
It doesn’t have an underdrawing, everything is painted directly in watercolour, there is no blocking in with pencil first, this is just going for it in paint and it showed me that I could draw and paint in one step, that my observational skills had improved since my student days.
I love my sketchbook
It is a place I can really play and there is no pressure to finish a drawing, share with anyone or anything. My sketchbooks are far from the picture perfect ones that people seem to share online, they really are a place to explore, and some aren’t as good for media as others. If you don’t want to spend much then I can recommend these ones from Artdiscount.co.uk, and in a pack of ten they are affordable
My methods
For years, I would sketch in pencil, then ink then erase the pencil then paint, and in the end I felt like I was just colouring in and each stage would lose some of the life of the drawing.
Drawing directly in paint is really freeing, you have to be confident with it though there is no fiddling with it on and on it will just look fussy and ugly.
At the moment I tend to draw directly in fountain pen, as quickly as I can, just a few minutes then let the ink dry before drawing again with paint over the top. I try to work quickly and do it all in a single session, I don’t really want to keep going over things for days at a time.