Sunday 8 June 2014

Sun sand, a watercolour sketch at Ramsgate


The business of sketching with a brush on the beach is an inexact one




The camera says it looks like this

these pictures relate to a comment






6 comments:

  1. Your art is certainly improving and inspiring, so thanks for sharing it with us all. Is this painting on blue tinted paper as I cannot see how you got such even coverage between the spirals of the binding and wall-to-wall even tint at the other three edges? Sure that I would have runs, dribbles and splotches all over the show!

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    1. Forgot to add ... your blog sidebar headlines a Thanet Star posting about Sophia Tobin as appearing at 'Waterstones in Ramsgate'. I live in Margate and know of only the one at Westwood Cross. Where in Ramsgate is this new one?

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    2. Colin the paper is a £2.99 sketch pad bought from The Works and isn’t toned, I think using my mobile phone to take the picture on the beach that made the top of the paper look a bit blue along the top edge, hard to say on the monitor.

      Looking at the picture on the paper the blue wash does also go up into the spirals a bit, I am pretty sure I got the top half of the paper wet before applying the wash of WN Artists Quality cobalt blue. The clouds mostly being the dry bits.

      The paper is pretty low quality and a bit on the grey side, which is how the bottom, unpainted bit appears on my computer monitor.

      As far as the good bad and ugly of how the paintings come out, I guess I am as surprised by the results as anyone else.

      The text in the links on the sidebar is sample automatically taken from the blog that the link goes to and if a branch of Waterstones has appeared in Ramsgate I haven’t noticed it.

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  2. Thanks for the info Michael. Roll on the next issue of 'International Artist' so that I can continue to dream of a talent that passed me by.

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    1. Colin having given the business of putting on washes some thought I realised that I had only really a rather vague idea exactly what I do myself. I very seldom paint from photos as frankly the paintings tend not to work out, but in this instance I have tried to put on the basic washes as though I was going to paint the photo in the post, I have taken a series photos of the various stages and put them in the post. The same £2.99 pad, the paint is yellow ochre, cobalt blue, the green is a mixture of Prussian blue and yellow ochre, a couple of times when things got a bit too wet to control I put the pad in the sun to dry out a bit. The different tones of blue like the horizon are produced by putting more cobalt blue on the cobalt blue wash. The whiter bits that would be waves on a calm sea if I could master them are zinc white gouache.

      As you see I get the paper wet first, so that is how the paint gets between the binder rings.

      Paint wise I buy it in tubes and squirt them into a folding pocket paint box, mostly the paint goes hard sometimes it emerges in my pocket.

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  3. Sorry off topic
    Very interesting letter you have posted from Clls Kim Gibson nothing i didn't expect but good to hear it from the horses mouth.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.