Over the last year, I’ve spent quite a lot of time staying local (no surprise there then) and for me, local means the beach and the coast paths around here in Sidmouth.
There’s a time of day known as ‘golden hour’ in the evening when the land gets that beautiful glow all over, the sun is just setting and the shadows are really long - it is beloved of photographers everywhere and with good reason, and we painters are quite partial to it as well.
So, sitting on the beach with a vast number of jumpers, gloves and bobble hats on, I’ve been sketching and taking photographs to take home and work up into larger, acrylic paintings on deep sided box canvasses. These are lovely to work on as I don’t need to worry about painting outside where the mount or the frame will go - I just paint right over the edges to wrap the picture round, which feels right with the scale of the landscapes I have been working on.
When I’m out sketching, all I’m aiming to capture is what is most important to me about the scene, for example this sketch of Orcombe Point, Exmouth.
The most important thing for me was the curve of the water, the echo of the same curves made by the high tide line on the sand, and the pebbles and shells on the high tide line. So that’s pretty much all I drew! For this particular sketch I’ve used a set of greyscale water-soluble felt tip pens, but I tend to grab whatever takes my fancy on a given day - sometimes it’s just pencils, sometimes it’s a bottle of ink or fineliner pens.
It would be easy just to take photos, but this process of really looking hard in order to draw, and working out what is most interesting about the view, tends to help me focus far better and produce far more purposeful paintings. It can be really hard to do this from a photo, I find. Sometimes I even stop looking at what I am sketching and just let my pen go with what I’m seeing. The lines always end up wonky but it’s a great way of capturing the feel of a place without worrying too much about technical accuracy!
From simple sketches like this, usually with a photo for back up in case I want to record the colours, I go home and make the painting. This particular sketch is in my ‘to do’ pile at the moment, but below are some of the body of work I’ve produced over the last few months in response to all that time staring out to sea. Definitely not time wasted!
To see what I’ve been painting, check out my gallery - some of this set were snapped up immediately but some are still waiting to find their perfect home.
