Tonal Sketches

During the time I have spent on this part I have been working on a series of london sketches. I chose to work on London as there are a lot of landmarks that I can sketch and they would look good as sketches. In my. collection so far I have done ; St Paul's Cathedral, Big Ben and Tower of London. There will be more sketches to follow.

Artistic Licence

Artistic licence is where you have the ability to change or adapt part of a readymade picture from a magazine or photo to make it your own. This could include changing positions of particular features of the picture. You might also change the colour of the sky in addition. Doing this it could enable you to be looser in your style of drawing or painting creating a possibly better image.

Equipment for Watercolour Painting

You will need:
Paper- Whatever feels the best to you like I mentioned in the last post.
Paints- A recognised name like windsor and Newton is preferable. If you are just starting out then I would recommend off of eBay "Essentials" it's 15 tubes of paint and 2 free brushes. The quality isn't as good as some but it's decent enough to get you started. The brand for those is Royal and Langnickel.
Brushes- If you don't get the set I have recommended then I would recommend getting 3 brushes from the stands you see in the likes of HobbyCraft or the Range. You should get a wash brush, round brush and a rigger brush.(Those will be defined tommorow!)
Palette- Of course you could use a dinner plate but any palette from a craft shop will cost you well under two pounds.
Pen- I would say to get a waterproof black very fine pen would be useful for pen and ink drawings

HB pencil and rubber

Types of Watercolour Paper

You can get many types of watercolour paper to suit your individual ability. When you are just playing around with watercolours you may just choose to go with very thin cartridge paper or possibly even standard printer paper. This is all perfectly fine although the quality of your painting will be very limited. As you get more experienced with watercolour painting you can get thicker paper, this could start from around 90lbs to what professional artists use - 140lbs. Brands are up to you but I would recommend Windsor and Newton. One other brand you could go for is Royal and Langnickel.

Sent from my iPod

St Paul's Cathedral

Here is my latest sketch of St Pauls Cathedral. This is a tonal sketch using various shades of pencil.

"Base Tones"

When sketching and in most cases painting you always add a base tone to areas of your drawing then add extra shadows.

Cross hatching

A technique useful in sketching is cross hatching it is a way of filling space without many hard lines.

Update on my Latest Sketch

This is continuing on Twitter but still

Step by Step St Pauls Cathedral

Check out my Twitter Feed @claire_12heart for a step on St Paul's Cathedral which when it's finished I will be uploading to my blog if you have missed it!

Sent from my iPod

Pastel Landscape

This is a landscape pastel drawing that I did based on a cheap DVD that I got in the January sales.

Monthly Challenge!

On the 8th day of each month this year I will be setting prompts for your own paintings/photos, which should get your creative juices flowing! So for January it is...........

Creativity

This probably sounds a bit strange if you are on here as an artist, but interpret this in your own way. For example it could be something still life related or even just a normal painting you would do. Feel free to interpret this however you like. If you don't mind sharing your results, email them to me at clairesart@hotmail.com so that I can upload them onto my blog to inspire other people like you.

Buckingham Palace

Sorry for the delay in posting this, Christmas just seemed to fly past!! I hope you had a fantastic Christmas!  Anyway, I completed this over the Christmas period, with one of my Christmas presents; How to paint London by Geoff Kersey. The book is probably one of the best that I have ever had as far as watercolours goes. It turns good paintings into fantastic ones, also it gives detailed  and well explained steps, even with tracings, which I didn't use for that particular painting. This picture is just watercolours, with a couple of watercolour pencils just to reinforce some of the lines. I hope you like it! Check out my Gallery for more of my pictures as the rest seem to get lost in all the posts :)

Kingfisher

I did this picture for a christmas present. It depicts a  Kingfisher that I have done using the majority of watercolour paints. To create the feather like texture on the body of the bird I used the end of the paintbrush ( I have a plastic ended paintbrush, but you could use any) . I also used a watercolour pencil to reinforce certain areas of the feathers.

Merry Christmas!!

Just to wish you a very Happy Christmas and the best of wishes for 2012!!!!!!!