I was painting a picture of some wild mushrooms today, as you do during Mynktober/Inktober and a man came up and asked what I was doing. We got chatting and he asked my name and whether I had work of Richmond Park, his local park. Well I do have quite a few pieces, and I also had this unfinished post about some of my recent work in Richmond Park ready to go including some noisy parakeets. Spook!
First up are the parakeet pieces, I was sketching these in September trying to get an angle on these noisy and very kinetic birds. I have drawn geese, robins, chickens, ducks, seagulls, roosters, cranes and swans and they are the hardest to draw by far. They simply do not keep still long enough! A good outing for the Kuretake Brush Pen though.
And finally a few older pieces at sunset, below King’s Clump. The Picnic is another parallel pen and watercolour piece – maybe not as successful as those but I like the sgraffito which covers this piece like a watermark. As usual it looked amazing and then it dried and the cadmiums I’d used heavily turned matte and it lost a lot of it’s life. I have been gently using cadmiums since this, usually in washes to avoid this effect.
Second is ‘Jacob Sunset’ – it should be called Epstein Sunset but sadly the name of Epstein is tainted by another now. I was greatly influenced by a piece in a Van Gogh exhibition a year or so ago of Hampstead Heath by Jacob Epstein. It was an ink drawing with a really loose watercolour over the top.
I’ve been trying to get looser and looser as a result, and this is the closest I’ve got to that piece. I’m not saying it’s as good as his piece, and the spreading was partly using too much water on the Artistico paper but I ran with it after struggling with it for a while.
I actually like the mix of loose and detailed now.
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