Walking Art

For this exercise I was tasked with making a study of something I see on a walk within five minutes of my house. I was required to make:

• Five sketches in black and diluted black ink on grey/beige postcard-size paper
• Five sketches in watercolour on HP watercolour paper, postcard-sized.

I wanted to make a coherent collection and so decided to create six of each. I took a walk from my house to the local park and captured a few of the different scenes I saw there.

I decided to paint the collection using just diluted black ink first, as I thought this would act as a good preliminary exercise to identify light and shadow so that when I introduce colour it would be easier to pick out these features.

I really enjoyed using just black diluted ink for this exercise. I tried to build the shadow by using layers of diluted ink as well as using speckling and dabbing to create leaves and plants.

It was slightly more challenging painting in watercolour to ensure the colours were correct and realistic. I think on the whole the studies are quite accurate, aside from the painting in the bottom right corner where the grass is slightly too vivid, as due to the heatwave a lot fo the grass has become quite dried out and lacklustre. It definitely helped creating the black diluted ink paintings first so this is quite helpful to know when I’m developing paintings in future.