Monday, 6 July 2015

An art lesson in perspective drawing for watercolour and pen, with some thoughts on corrections when it all goes wrong.

The pen and watercolour painting of Ramsgate from Oak Hotel that I have been painting in the mornings, for about the last week before I go to work, had some significant drawing errors.

Anyway I couldn’t quite nail where I had gone wrong, so I toddled of to York Street Gallery which is run by Mike Sampson, who is a proper professional artist who also gives people art lessons.

Mike, of course could see immediately what was wrong with the picture and as soon as he pointed it out to me, well so could I.


So here is the picture after I had had a bit of a daub yesterday morning, mostly around The Royal, top right. The bit that I think is ok is the part in the yellow box, top left. The cars going from right to left at about head height are a bit of a deliberate joke, and are mostly there to separate the two parts of the picture, so ignore them.

The red lines lead to the vanishing point, which I guess must be somewhere of screen where Port Ramsgate is, the horizontal lines on the fronts of the buildings, should be roughly at the same angles as the red lines.

The blue lines represent the posts that hold up the fence around the tables outside The Oak, I guess it's even obvious to people who don’t paint and draw, that the post nearest to the artist should appear bigger than the one further away.

My excuse is that that I got up very early and was still asleep when I drew it.


Here is the picture after about an hour outside The Oak this morning trying to sort out the worst of it.

As this is an art lesson I use a little paintbox, little paintboxes usually come with paint that isn't the colours and quality that you want, so I pick out the paint, which gives me an empty paint box.


I then fill up the pans with paint squirted from tubes, in the winter I leave it on a radiator to dry out and in the summer I leave in the sun to dry out.



Most of the tubes of colour I use are standing up in the top part of the picture, which if you click on it will get bigger and then even bigger if you click on it again then you should be able to read what colours they are.    

Alternatively you can come and look at the range of secondhand books on how to paint and draw in my bookshop in Ramsgate

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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.