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.

Another Tack... Ready About!

As some of you may, or may not, know my "day job" is the most enjoyable one of being an illustrator.  I have done this for about 15 years now.  Before that the "day job" was a muralist until I muraled my way out of Cornwall, as my five kids were quite small I decided that something more home based was a good plan, found myself an agent and started illustrating.  Very soon it became necessary for my partner in crime to become the "house husband" as the illustration work grew.  I learned how to work with a graphics tablet using a great programme called Corel Painter.  So the illustration became created on a computer. 
I still painted when I could but not nearly enough.  Flash forward a few years and the youngest child flew the nest so I started really painting, quite fast and obsessively.  It was a distraction from that dreadful empty nest.  So then I had two sides, like a split personality, illustration and painting. 

Now for the exciting bit... Just recently, through a chance meeting over one of my paintings I have had the chance to do some illustration work that is much more like painting.  It might well develop into quite a big thing.  I have always earned my living, somehow, using my skills as an artist and I must say that there is, for me, a great pleasure in selling work!  I think in my head it allows me to work, it is such a nice way to live you see that I think I must feel guilty!!  Anyway as a result of going slightly off piste with both the illustration and the painting I seem to have found yet another personality that wants to get out.  I am planning a trip around all the little ports of Cornwall to make plen air paintings in a most illustrative style, so watch this space for paintings that are beside the sea, but not what I usually do.  I expect they will be a bit like the one below but with harbours and cottages like the ones above.  I will keep you posted as to how it all progresses.

North Norfolk Salt Marsh Harbours

Boat in the harbour, Brancaster Staithe. photograph: Vivien Blackburn

The North Norfolk coast is totally unlike the Cornish coast - unlike the wild seas, steeper beaches and coves, clean sand and rugged cliffs of the south western tip of England, the coast here is softer, gentler, muddier from the silt washed down from rich farmland. I have to admit I love the wildness of Cornwall more but this area has its own charm.

Photographs of Thornham creek and Brancaster Staithe, North Norfolk

There is a short section of cliff at Hunstanton but most of the coast is salt marsh. Inland are low hills that dip down to flat land, fields that were once marsh but have been drained, marsh and dunes.

The cottage I sketched recently on my blog was being thatched with reed from this area - just a little further along the coast at Cley.

The harbours have creeks that thread to the sea through channels - the sea only reachable at high tide.

You may recognise some of these places in sketches and paintings on my sketchbook site and main website