More urban sketching

16th Sep 2019 ~ Jo Dungey ~ Leave a comment

This weekend I have been sketching in London. Above is a drawing I did on Saturday of the ever-changing City skyline, drawn from near Tower Bridge. It amazes, and sometimes worries me how quickly major developments take place in key areas of London. A couple of years ago, Norman Foster’s ‘Gherkin’ building on St Mary Ax dominated the view of the ‘new’ City. Now new buildings have shot up which dwarf it.

On Sunday, I was helping run a sketch crawl with Urban Sketchers London at Trinity Buoy Wharf. This is further east, across the Thames from the O2 in North Greenwich (originally the Millennium Dome). Trinity Buoy Wharf has the only lighthouse in London, surrounded by other older industrial/nautical buildings. It is now a centre for cultural activities and related businesses, surrounded by very new high-rise housing and offices, with great views of the river. My sketches take different elements of this and put them together. All sketches are done with coloured pencil on prepared but random backgrounds in watercolour, on a concertina sketchbook. Below are the drawings from Trinity Buoy Wharf:

Park Life: Nature and the city

16th Aug 2019 ~ Jo Dungey ~ Leave a comment

Last weekend I joined a workshop run by Pushing Your Sketching Boundaries, taught by Isabel Carmona and Celia Burgos. We worked out of doors in Hampstead and Highgate in north London. Our sketches were focussed on two main themes: contrasting the city and nature, using watercolour, and using colour to show tone and depth, using coloured pencils. Here are some pictures I created.

Day 1: Working on Parliament Hill, one of the highest parts of London, I did several studies which showed a panoramic view of the city through trees, and individual houses framed by trees.

This was quite a challenge, but I learned a lot. The second and third pictures above had colour washes added later at home – I think the apricot sky helps, and the added blue is overdone. The warm, apricot sky is not realistic; I added the colour I though the picture needed. I am not sure why it has taken me such a long time to realise I can do this. It helps, particularly when a subject is green and more green.

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The painting above I think is better, and benefitted from the experience of doing the others.

Day 2: This looked at using colour, and coloured pencils, to represent tone (light/dark), texture, and depth, in particular the principal that warm colours (reds, oranges, reddish browns) appear to come forward in a painting, and cool colours (blues, bluish greens) to recede. Here are some quick experiments.

Here are two simple tonal drawings drawn with a single colour. For each one, I painted a simple watercolour afterwards, to remind myself of the principles.

In Amsterdam

1st Aug 2019 ~ Jo Dungey ~ Leave a comment

Lately, I have spent a week in Amsterdam, including the annual international get-together of Urban Sketchers. About a thousand urban sketchers explored the city, painting and drawing on location. There were record-breaking high temperatures here as in other parts of northern Europe. I looked for shade, in particular enjoying the Amsterdam botanic garden and the parks. Here are some watercolour impressions of the city, including the canals, typical houses, the derelict areas of dockland, and dramatic modern buildings.

An English garden

21st Jul 2019 ~ Jo Dungey ~ 2 Comments

The garden in question was Queen Mary’s Garden in Regent’s Park, London, since I don’t have space for 12,000 rose bushes at home. Urban Sketchers London visited on Saturday 20 July 2019. I had hoped to work in watercolour, but painting an English garden requires account to be taken of English weather, and what was forecast was ‘sunshine and showers’. So I returned to my concertina sketchbook and prepared some pages in advance with abstract watercolour washes. I could then draw on location with coloured pencils – more compatible with the stop-start weather which was forecast. The weather was better than expected. In the drawings, I incorporated different views of the gardens, with an emphasis on variety of mark-making in the drawings.

Experiments with watercolour

13th Jul 201913th Jul 2019 ~ Jo Dungey ~ 2 Comments

This week I spent a few days at St. Ives, Cornwall. I took part in a three day course called Expressive Watercolour, which had a particular emphasis on techniques to create effects and textures with watercolour such as using salt, resists, and different tools to apply paint. I had hoped for more opportunities to paint out of doors, but took the opportunity in the studio to paint three versions of the same view using different approaches. These were based on a pencil drawing I did on location of the church and houses overlooking the harbour at St Ives.

Windmills on my mind

24th Jun 201924th Jun 2019 ~ Jo Dungey ~ Leave a comment

Later in July, I am travelling to Amsterdam, to take part in the annual Urban Sketchers international meet-up. Of course, I am very excited to meet with hundreds of other sketchers and to draw scenes of Amsterdam. And when an English visitor thinks of Holland – tourist cliché alert – that includes windmills, doesn’t it? So, maybe some practice is in order.

Did you know we have windmills in London? My fellow sketcher, Lis Watkins (both of us are admins for Urban Sketchers London) and I set off to explore. We found and sketched three in South London, from left to right: in Wimbledon, Brixton, and Shirley, near Croydon.

The wonderful windmill sketches of Lis Watkins can be found on the international website of Urban Sketchers, where she is one of the London correspondents.

Exploring Stoke-on-Trent

9th Jun 2019 ~ Jo Dungey ~ 2 Comments

This weekend, 7 – 9 June 2019, I have been sketching Stoke-on-Trent, the historic home of the English ceramics industry, including Wedgewood, Spode and other pioneering firms. This was the location of the annual get-together of UK Urban Sketchers, and we spent the weekend exploring the city and sketching.

The drawings I have done are a continuous image in a concertina sketchbook, and I have scanned them two at a time here.

The subjects are: Stoke Minster, outside and inside, including a panel of memorial wall tiles by Minton, a display of modern ceramics at the Potteries Museum, the façade of the Wedgewood Institute, ceramics moulds at the Middleport Pottery, inside the bottle oven at Middleport, a building in the town centre of Hanley, a bottle kiln at Middleport, and a vase made by Josiah Wedgewood. Without planning this, I feel I am now a bit better informed about the history of this industry.