Sometimes you have to look long and draw fast!

Volissos Fishing Boat (Pastel 19.5" x 25.5")

I don't know if you've ever had a go at drawing boats but their 'architecture' and the way perspective works is a bit different to buildings!

I was reminded of this while accompanying Sarah Wimperis and her husband around the Royal Society of Marine Artists exhibition (see my REVIEW: Royal Society of Marine Artists - 65th Annual Exhibition 2010)

Listening to "Big Dave" tell me about which boats had NOT been drawn or painted by people who understood boats convinced me that we shouldn't try to "hack it" when drawing boats.  Just like wildlife or flowers we should always take some time out to work out how they are put together and what makes them work.

It seemed to me that careful observation is probably the key.

I was then reminded of an experience I had in Chios, a Greek island in the northern Aegean Sea, back in 1995.  I was staying in Volissos and we were drawing fishing boats down in Limnos harbour.  Or rather I was trying to draw fishing boats.  I was having one of those experiences where you gradually begin to understand this is a LOT more difficult than it looks and that I had attempted a subject I didn't understand - and I was making a complete pig's ear out of it.

Before lunch I decided I needed to do something to make sure that it hadn't been a completely wasted morning - and to see whether I'd learned anything. 

I took a complete sheet of what was known in those days as Rembrandt Pastel Card and drew just one boat "up close and personal" in pastels. 

The trick was I didn't think too much about what I was looking at but rather tried to observe closely and use what I'd learned in terms of the big shapes and proportions and basic structure of a boat.  I got it very nearly right (it bulges a wee bit too much on the right hand side!) and I think drawing on a big sheet also helped.

The drawing at the top was actually completed in 20 minutes - at the end of which I seemed to have produced a boat which was not immediately about to fall over and sink! :)  Honour was redeemed.  It would appear that the whole morning had not been a lost cause and that maybe I had learned something.

Afternoon on the Water

The best things seem to happen without being planned.  I had worked all morning and was walking the dog, down through the woods, into the little village of Helford then up past the Sailing Club when I was ambushed and persuaded to go out on our little boat.

What a beautiful day, sun sparkling on the water, a light breeze.  I found some old watercolour crayons, some paper, and a scrappy old brush, the dogs bowl for water and did some sketching.  It soon gave way to a bit of dozing in the sun, sipping white wine from an old tin mug and generally relaxing.

We saw a flock of gannets falling out of the sky over and over again, diving on mackerel.  We saw dolphins leaping through the water, so fast, in joyful packs.

Big Dave does all the work, reefing jibs and hauling mainsails, I am still telling myself that I will learn to sail one day, too busy drawing right now, oh yes and snoozing, and being generally lazy.  We sailed right across the bay to Falmouth, where we went ashore, like salty sea dogs and had a supper of the finest fish and chips from Rick Stine's fish restaurant and then a beer overlooking the harbour.

   We came home just as the sun was dipping behind the trees on the Helford river, bowing out on the longest day of the year.

Singapore Boats

Singapore Boats
(23" x 17") coloured pencils on black Canson Mi Teintes
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Sometimes you have an image which takes quite some time to come to fruition. This is the tale of one such image.

Back in 1987 I went to Singapore for the overseas field trip for my MBA so we could find out how business works in a completely different environment to the UK.

I wasn't even drawing at the time. My art had been left behind at school a long time ago and doing a 'full-on' MBA part-time at the London Business School at same time as holding down a management job meant virtually all my 'spare' time was accounted for. I remember I actually qualified for an NUS card as a full time student because of the number of contact hours we managed each month in School!

However on one evening we went down to the harbour and I saw the fishing boats at dusk. Something about them made me take a photograph. When I got the photographs back, it looked like a painting. I was amazed. I'd not really taken 'arty' photos before and I was very struck by the strength of the image - particularly of the boats in the foreground. However it got filed away along with the rest of my MBA studies and I got on with what was now a senior management job!


Some time later, I decided to try my art again as a completely different activity which would balance out the type of job I was doing at the time - artistic instead of numerical, solitary and peaceful instead of a regular round of meetings. It worked and that's when I started to get back into my art - starting with watercolour.

I subsequently realised that I really enjoyed drawing and in the early 90s started using coloured pencils again. Then joined an art forum in the middle of the last decade.

Eighteen years later I finally got round to drawing the boats. I'd had them in my head for a long time and went searching for them while I was leading a project about drawing water.

Now you've heard the back story, here's the whole sequence of images of how this drawing came about - plus an explanation of what I said back in 2005 when I did it.

Probably the most important thing I did was crop the photo so I started with something manageable from my perspective - the large photo is nice but I'd be doing boats forever as opposed to the water.

Next I printed off a colour print of the cropped photo onto A4 matte photo paper and a greyscale onto plain paper. I then gridded the greyscale and the black Canson into thirds. This is really just a guide for me - I eyeballed the drawing from there using a celadon green (background colour of the water) - not being too precious about super accuracy but enough that the boats don't look too silly and I'm keeping the proportions on the page which I designed into the crop.

This is a slightly smaller version of the image as I got my initial scans wrong and couldn't be bothered to do them again - so there's a bit more at both the top and bottom!

So far as the boats are concerned I'm only focusing on the big shapes at this stage - detail is not allowed until a lot further on when the decision gets made as to which bits get the detail. So there's a nod in the direction of tyres around the boat - but they're not carefully drawn nor will they be for the time being.

Then I started to get a layer down all over the area of water. I started by finding the right colour for the reflections of the boats and then worked on the lighter areas. Bear in mind I'm really scouring the photo for slight changes in colour and looking hard for what the colours are. There's a ton of hues between very dark green (which hasn't made an appearance yet) moving through beep blue greens and mid greens and sky blue and yellow greens through to an awful lot of tints of grey green and just a smidgen of white. (Do you want to know the colours?) I worked colours from both into the boats as I went to help the unity of the painting.

I'm working quite hard at this stage in getting the shape of both the reflections and the negative shapes inbetween them right - as in my experience this is what gives the painting the feeling that the water is 'real'. I'm also working over the edges of the reflections a bit so they don't get too hard (but without losing sight of the underlying shape) - they should be a tad blurry at this stage. I decide where to go for hard edges later.

I'm using the pencils on their side and cover vast amounts of paper really fast this way - plus it stops me being too pernickety about it and helps to merge colours in a pleasing way. I'm not too fussed about which direction I'm doing this in but broadly speaking it's a lateral movement. They're basically quite light layers - I'm not pressing hard at all.

I picked out a few colours to start the boats off - one or two brights hatched onto boat roofs and tarpaulins in the background (as generally this is going to be quite muted and I wanted to see what the brights looked like) plus I wanted to try and find the right colour for the weather beaten wood

Subsequently I included the drawing in a portfolio of work for admission to an art society and worked on it some more to get to the drawing at the top. I do remember adding in a tiny bit more red on the boats. Unfortunately I have to tell you that coloured pencils have an unhappy habit of sinking into black Canson paper over time so although this looked good at the time it had to be 'rescued' to produce the image at the top of the post for the portfolio.

I daren't look at it one more time.......the boats may have sunk yet again!

More from Brittany

The subtitle to this post should be The End, because I've come to the last of my Breton sketches. To see them all, check my blog. For now, you will have to scroll through recent posts, but I'm in the process of making a separate Brittany sketchbook there, as well.

Oh, how I miss that time and place already.

I have one more, VERY exciting watery trip upcoming next month! See you here, with sketches, in midDecember!

Sailing away... or towards me

While I was pootling around on the edges of Lake Michigan in a motorised rubber dinghy, I sketched one of the sailboats coming back into the marina. At first I was drawing madly and squinting for detail - but of course detail is exactly what you lose with distance. In all the photos I'm sure things aren't right! I know nothing about sailboats - so my brain was no doubt filling in things I didn't really see. (I was in Chicago and Racine for a month, see my own blog entry here.)



Never did get a chance to go out sailing for a day, despite offers from a few of the fellow boat residents. (one day was too rough, one day had no wind at all)

Canvas and Paint Process 4

Final touches. The details need to be brought to life, minute touches of paint describe the form of ropes and canvas. The blue vinyl cover of the front boat must be "shinied" up and the water needs its sparkle added...

This is when I start nearly closing my eyes to see what to do, that and rushing to the mirror to "see" it all fresh and spot the glaring mistakes. I also try to dredge up the smells and sounds of the place, I want to give it that and I know of no other way other that intense concentration. If I get interrupted at this stage I am horrible!
Sometimes, right at the end of a painting I might make glazes of colour to adjust tones. To do this I use Liquin, you can also use Linseed oil. When you have used Liquin it will dry shiny but that can be sorted out by the final varnishing when all is dry.

So here it is, finished and dry. I will seal it with a matt varnish, two coats carefully applied with a soft brush. After that it is off to the framers. I use Sully's in Penryn. I was totally amazed at his work, a frame makes a huge difference and when I get this back I will take a picture and show you.
For this painting I have used small brushes, mostly flats, I have a couple of cats tongue shaped ones, nothing above a size 4. I tend to but packs of soft brushes, ones that say they are suitable for oil and acrylic, I find hogs hair too scratchy for my style. I will also use pieces of card or paper to almost print lines and little shapes onto the painting.

Finally I do try to spend some time really cleaning the brushes well with brush cleaning soap and then rinsing well and letting them dry flat on a tea towel.

You can see the EXACT location of this painting if you go here: Paintmap

I hope that you have enjoyed this sneaky peek into how I work and also that you have found it useful and informative.

Canvas and Paint Process 3

Now I am starting to block in colours. Each layer is slightly transparent so it is still possible to see the white under painting which will serve as a guide to the more fiddly bits.

Even though the sea beyond the boats will be very light in the finished painting I begin to block in the darkest of the colour that I can see in the sea! For most of the time with oil painting I like to work from the dark towards the light, this however, is only a general rule, I often break it.

And here I have done just that, painting in the lightest areas on the rowing boat and the covered boat. Painting what appear to be white areas is difficult and involves a lot of colour soul searching... when is white white... not very often in my experience. I tend to keep "tube white" (i.e. straight from the tube) to the very last moment, to give that final flourish. The tiny dabs of paint that make a painting spring to life. I have also begun to work into the blues. You can make a blue almost luminous by glazing one blue over another, for example a curealean blue first with a glaze of ultramarine, try it and see. It is important to mess around with colours to see what they do to each other, watercolours especially have different effects.

Every day I have a new pallet. I believe that this keeps my colour mixing up to the minute. If there is a grey mixed I might be tempted to use it rather than bother to think and make a judgement for each tone and hue.

Now I seem to have gone right back to a pale blue on the water. Indecision of just a change of heart? Not sure. I think the most important thing to remember is to keep an open mind, try things out, experiment, even right up to the last minute. Sometimes the wash or glaze that you sweep on at the last sitting is the one that transforms the painting.

The next and final post will include a paint map link to the site of these boats. See you soon.

The Studio Boat #1 - Monet's bateau atelier

Le bateau-atelier (1874) by Claude Monet (1840 - 1926)
19-5/8 x 25-1/4 inches, oil on canvas

Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands

The studio boat has an honourable history. It's been responsible for an awful lot of art which now commands very high values.

Claude Monet is renowned for painting plein air. He even took his studio outdoors and on to the water for some of his paintings. In 1873 Monet had a 'fruitful sale' which enabled him to have a studio boat built. He may well have decided to get one after an association with Daubigny (a member of the Barbizon School) who had a studio boat which he used a lot to paint along the Seine and the Oise. Monet seems to have moored his boat close to home at Argenteuil and later Vertheuil and only used it within a short radius of both homes situated on the north bank of the River Seine west of Paris.

Monet created three paintings of his studio boat and this is the first - painted in 1874.

This is the start of a series of posts about paintings of studio boats and about paintings done from studio boats - and of artists painting other artists in their studio boats.

Now - who wants a studio boat?