Camera and brush in Canterbury

There are several ways of approaching watercolour paintings of buildings and I suppose the most reliable would be pencil then pen then rubber then wash.

By this I mean you do a pencil sketch and by the process of rubbing out the bits that looks wrong and putting them right you then get something you can go over with a Pitt pen or some other permanent fine liner pen. All you have to do then is rub out the pencil and colour the sketch in with very diluted watercolour.

However you go about it with watercolour very thin or diluted tends to produce the best results.

Another technique is drawing a feint pencil sketch to guide your brush strokes, B hardness pencils or harder don’t smudge much when you get their marks wet and once the paint is dry a lot of the pencil will rub off if you want it to.

These are all good techniques used by important artists I don’t think there is any such thing as cheating in art, just different techniques –it’s the results that count.

Back in 2011 when I first started drawing and painting I used all of the above, however recently I have been painting just with a brush in watercolour. There is no way back in any real and useful sense with this method, basically I paint something, looks at the mistakes and then go back and paint it again.

You can see from the photo I still have some way to go with this process, the cathedral is a rather demanding model, with lots of complex shapes which really lend themselves to the rubbing out method.

I think this applies to modern buildings as well to an extent, I had a go at painting a bit of the University of Kent from the Gulbenkian Theatre Café yesterday. It’s fairly easy to express the look and feel of modernish campus buildings with photographs, but watercolour is another matter.  

Personally having had a difficult time in educational establishments I don’t necessarily feel particularly comfortable on campus. Something like a concentration camp survivor going on holiday to Butlins is as close as I can get. With a painting I hope to express something that wouldn’t be found in a photograph, so I think I will need to have various attempts going back and painting there to get this one how I want too.

On to the photographs of Canterbury, once again taken with my new and very cheap mobile phone an OUKITEL K6000 Pro. Now with addition of A Better Camera App, the main advantage of the app being that I can set the phone’s camera focus on infinity. This means that in strong light everything more than about 3 feet away is always in focus and in poorer lighting conditions everything more than 6 feet away is in focus.

The cathedral with its difficult lighting and some outside shots pretty much straight into the sun seemed to be a good place to better learn a new phone camera, so here are the photos.