A couple of weeks in retreat, drawing in Scotland and Northumberland

A nice summer "chilled out holiday" for the last two weeks has been just enough to recharge my batteries.  I've done some good sketching practice too, mainly focussed on portrait sketches of my lovely wife, and also some architectural sketches as well, with a couple of more illustrative style line drawings with mixed media paints to compliment the work over the fortnight.

I think I am making slow improvement. My drawing is becoming a bit more confident, as I seem to be equipped now to at least attempt to tackle most subjects, however I know that it is, without doubt, essential to practice my sketching every day.    "Never a day without a line" still resonates in my mind as a regular reminder to make time for this most (in my opinion), essential of skills in any art practice.  I do find it hard though to make time some days, what with so many distractions, which quite often, are of my own making.  I wish I could drop out of all the hustle and bustle of our everyday on-line existence (like e-mails, social interactions, surface mail, banking duties, Facebook, twitter etcetera), and just live to paint and draw!...

Well, here are some examples of the sketches over the last fortnight, in no particular order...
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 Continuing the exercises from Betty Edwards Book, "drawing on the Right side of the Brain", I sketched a small abstract from one of the great Masters of 20th century art, that being

  "Self-portrait", by Edward Steichen. Published in Camera Work No 2, 1903

The next exercise I gave myself was to do a toned paper (3B Graphite stick) three quarter sketch of Julie.  Now, I also bent the rules a little bit here to experiment, and it seemed to work!! - I tried to draw Julie with much thinner features and younger look, - amazingly, I seem to have pulled this off and I (and of course Julie too) was very pleased with the result.

  So onto some further 3/4 portraits, but this time, from different facial expressions and an angle looking down  on a seated model.  These too, came out pretty well.

But it wasn't all portraiture, and later in the first week of our stay in Scotland, I spent an hour or so doing a simple water colour sketch in my travelling notebook, of the cottage at the head of the glenn, = Yes, it really did look like a top of a chocolate / biscuit tin scene!  The colours were magnificent, the purple heather was in full bloom, and the wee bothy had just recently been re-whitewashed....

The watercolour inspired me to take some more photos of the area and use them as reference materials...

 For example, Traquire house has so much history I just have to paint this properly!

 

And Abbotsford, near Melrose, which was the home built by the 19th Century novelist, Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet.  his house architecture seduced me into a good hours worth of sketching, which only ended when I had to take shelter from the rain!