A Note on Colour.

You’re the manic sort who sits in a corner of a cafe and viciously draws everything and everyone you see. You’re the crowd-puller in the park, as spectators sprout behind you, watching you work as you make a detailed study of a tree. You stop traffic in a crowded market street by setting up an easel, ready to capture life as we know it on a A4 sheet. Well! And you’re equipped with one or more of the following colouring materials to sketch away at the world outside exactly the way you see it.

Coloured Pencils: Quick, handy and clean, coloured pencils are useful for shading in as well as for drawing.

Watercolour pencils: Shapeshift gracefully from the clean clayey stroke of a coloured pencil to chaotic, transparent watercolours at the touch of a wet brush. Very convenient for watercolouring  in quick sketches, if you’re not the sort who lugs around watercolour tubes or palettes.

Watercolours and Inks: The unforgiving medium, that can create an almost magical happy accident with their tricksy bleeds and watery edges, or sometimes for these exact same reasons cause a tragic disaster of a finished artwork. Watercolours really shine when they’re used on white (light-coloured) paper because they’re transparent and rely a whole lot on the brightness of the paper for their overall effect.

Get hold of the school-kid’s box of 12 (or more) watercolour cakes for a convenient carry-around set of colours, or create your own by allowing inks or tube watercolours to dry on a white palette. Remember to use a watercolour brush with this medium, the kind that have soft bristles and that absorb and hold water while you paint.

Acrylics and poster paints: The antithesis to watercolours; forgiving in their opacity! They let you paint over and over your work till you’re finally done. Poster colours are have a chalky consistency and can be used even after the contents of the little bottle have gone dry. Acrylics can be layered and can be used to create “brushy”, textured paintings. Both media can be dry brushed, and when watered down enough, can even be a worthy substitute for watercolours.

You can carry just a few basic colours like blue, red, yellow, white and black and create an infinity of shades and tints.Use a poster brush with strong, coarse bristles because these paints can be quick-drying and tacky, which would mean a quick and sorry death to a watercolour brush.

{ Never, ever let a brush stand in water for too long. Try it and see, the brush tip gets all bendy and impossible to straighten and work with. }

Pastels and crayons: Pastels and crayons are soft media that can be used to create fuzzy lines and soft gradients of shading. Try them on darker-toned paper to really let them sing!

Paper collage: If you’ve got some interesting bits of coloured, patterned or textured paper or fabric lying around (else go collect some…! gift wrap, newspaper, craft paper, or paper that you’ve painted on.) this can make for a really fun, wacky technique of colouring.

So go on, give your sketchbook the zap of electricity it needs by using a whole lot of colour!

Big bad scary drawing.

Drawing is really darned scary for so many people. “I can’t draw.” “Did you draw that with your own hand?” (Yes, who else’s!) “Eeee… these are really bad drawings. Don’t look at them.” “I don’t draw because I don’t know how.” “I am a graphic designer so I don’t have to draw.” “My left toe hurts so I can’t draw.” The list of excuses is endless. So here’s some more demystifying tips for those happy folks who’ve got a sketchbook close at hand and a desire to draw in their heads.

1. Why not?

Remember art classes and those good ol’ Navneet drawing books from back in school? Everybody created versions of the familiar “scenery”, stippled, dabbed and scraped across layers of mucky oil pastel.  Nobody stopped to say “I can’t draw.” What changes now that we’re “all grown up”? Perhaps its a feeling of being watched, judged, or of measuring up to something or the other. (Read Vinod’s post on Belief.) The first thing to do is to draw like nobody’s watching (not even you). You’re drawing it for you the way that you keep a diary for you. When you let go of the Watcher around you, you can really observe your surroundings and make those visual notes about them that we call drawing.

2. What do I draw?

Well, lets look around. We’ve got a beautiful, wacky world around us waiting to be captured on paper.  There are people, trees, houses, dogs, squirrels, birds, vehicles and so much more. Besides, you can look to your immediate surroundings and draw your own  toes and fingers. You can pull out old photographs and try to turn those into a drawing. You can delve into your own head and pin down that awesome conceptual butterfly that just floated in there a moment ago. You might have a sudden urge to draw a dinosaur out for a walk with a top hat on. Draw it.

3. How do I draw?

Grab some paper and a pencil. As George has mentioned in his earlier posts, the pencil is superb for soft lines that you can mess around with endlessly, erase (if you’re the sort that likes a “perfect”, finished drawing”) and shade with in gradations from dark to light.

A great idea for “loosening up” your drawing hand is to draw a whole lot of circles on a plain old A4 sheet. Fill the sheet with circles, and then fill another sheet with straight lines. Make your strokes loose and quick without any aims at exactness, perfection or neatness. Draw until you’re on a roll to draw more complex stuff. Like this.

Pick a subject to draw. You’ll find that most subjects are either still or moving, and I’d recommend drawing the still ones first, practising on them till you’re cool enough to take on a mover and shaker! You could be drawing outdoors, and pick an interesting building or tree or sleeping guy to draw. Or on an exceptionally rainy day, you’d be indoors, still itching to draw, and pulling off photos from the Internet as your references.  The general rules of drawing apply to all of these subjects.

Observe the form of the object. Or the shape or silhouette that it makes against the surrounding space.For example, look at this doggie here.

When you start to draw him you’d find that what you “know” about a dog’s shape will kick in and you’ll start to try and draw those without “seeing” what this particular dog is all about. Then issues of exactitude creep in and could possibly make you so bent on creating a perfect doggie that it could drive you nuts. For now, we’re only trying to draw what we see, because what we see is going to sit around for some time, and we can look at it for as long as we like and draw it real slow. Drawing what we know is important in a case of a moving object (like a real, moving, live people) our subject has posed for us for practically 10 seconds, and we need to fill in the blanks of our drawing with what we “know”.

So look at the subject through half closed eyes and spot areas of “light” and “dark” that soon resolves into shapes that you can put down on paper. Like this.

And you get this.

Which you shade in to get this.

This could very well be a completed sketch! Or you could get real finicky and add some detail. You might get something like this.

And that’s all there is to it. All. I promise you.

Here’s another example.

If you give this method a think, you’ll realise that what you’ve just captured is one still frame of a moving object. And it took you a certain amount of time to do this. If you keep drawing subjects of this kind, for a while (anything from one day to a few weeks) you’ll realise you get faster and more confident at dashing out lots and lots of  drawings. You’ll find you can get a light-dark-shape analysis of any subject more easily, and you’ll take on a moving object quick-scan-and-draw sometime.

Who ever imagined that you couldn’t draw?

4. Now what?

Go draw, you. Go.

The Sketchbook Tour

It’s like a concert tour, except with sketchbooks! A very interesting concept from the art house scoop, the sketchbook project invites artists to fill a moleskin textbook with sketches and send them in for participation in a touring exhibit. Take a look.