Thursday, 5 July 2012

Greyfriars Canterbury

Not really that much to say today, we went to Canterbury where I bought a few books and a tube of paint.

I did get half an hour to sit in Greyfriars and do the pen and watercolour sketch above, photo below for aspiring art critics.

at

5 comments:

  1. Don WoodJuly 06, 2012 1:50 pm

    Michael I found a way to satisfy your photography and drawing on deviant art.com

    http://jennystokes.deviantart.com/critique/649062143/#/d55slfb
    made me smile.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Michael ChildJuly 06, 2012 4:23 pm

      Thanks for that Don it illustrates completely why I mostly paint and draw from life rather than from a photo.

      As you see the whole of Ben Hein’s picture looks lensy apart from the bloke and his bunch of flowers, which looks drawn either from life or his imagination.

      I think this is mostly because a human being’s eyeballs revolve so you get a completely different look.

      Obviously I could get a better picture copying a photo and even more accurate tracing a photo, and then take a photo of this picture of a photo and put it on the blog.

      You also need to appreciate that as I don’t sell my sketches, they don’t have to be commercially viable.

      The photo taken from a bit further back than where I was sitting as the camera on my mobile phone didn’t have revolving eyes and so couldn’t fit the scene in meant the angle was changed so you couldn’t see the rather attractive pair of legs belonging to the girl lying on the grass through the archway.

      The grass in the archway is represented by a rather religious looking green shadow enjoying the legs in the style of William Blake.

      Delete
    2. AnonymousJuly 09, 2012 12:53 pm

      Enjoying your watercolour paintings. When I go out I always seem to buy a tube of paint. There are some interesting new pigments being produced.

      Delete
    3. Michael ChildJuly 09, 2012 2:13 pm

      Most of the time I use a limited palate 14 colours, Winsor and Newton artist’s quantity, out sketching any more is difficult to manage, I also have no worries about them being colourfast as I don’t sell stuff.

      The main reds I use are the madders, particularly rose madder, main browns I use burnt umber and yellow ochre, yellow, lemon yellow, but find I can only get the colour of magnolia buildings mixing naples yellow and titanium white, most of my washes, sky sea sand, are various mixtures of, cobalt blue, yellow ochre and rose madder.

      Prussian blue, brown madder and vandkye brown are the ones I use with strong dyes, using them is like the watercolour equivalent of Russian roulette.

      I mostly mix my own greens but buy olive green.

      Davey’s and Payne’s grey and ivory black I also use.

      I always buy paint in tubes and squirt them into pans because it is much cheaper then buying full pans.

      Delete
  2. AnonymousMarch 02, 2013 4:34 pm

    The sketches looked like they were done by a child. Were they?

    ReplyDelete

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.