Pencil and Watercolour Sketching, the great outdoors

Watercolour Sketch
County Kilkenny
Ireland

Sketching in the great outdoors

This year I hope to use other forms of recording the landscape that I find around me other than photography alone, I love creating images using my camera but I want to dig in a little deeper and spent a lot more time at each location.

There are so many art based media that can be used to create a sketch, such as (Pastels, pens, pencils, charcoal and paint).

Personally I love using Pencils and Waterolour paints, both are very simple to use and very easy to carry around. Pencil is the most direct and very easy to always have with you in a bag. Watercolour paints requires you to have a supply of water and a palette for mixing colours, both simple to have available and easy to use. A monotone Watercolour sketch is a great way to make use of this medium, used to capture all the tones that you can see in the landscape in-front of you and a lot faster than using a pencil to record the lights and dark’s in your image.

I find that the process of starting and finishing a sketch outside to be the perfect way of relaxing, its very hard to think about anything else on your mind from the moment you start working and by the time you have finished, your mind is filled with little else other than how you can use you finished sketch later for a painting or more detailed drawing.

Add your sketch to some photographs you took and you have the perfect set of images available to create larger works in oil or acrylic paints.

The sketches here are a small sample of some work produced during an art course I completed a while back …..