From Field to Studio

I have grown to love sketching out in the field when I get the chance; I’m not as prolific as I’d like to be, mainly because I’m just not fast enough. I’m really happy if I have something to come back with, to use as reference for a larger painting. There is something energetic and alive in a sketch, which captures the moment far more than any photograph I can take. They also act as a visual diary, a way to remember a particular walk or encounter. For this reason I tend to keep my sketches as just that, a snapshot as opposed to a completed piece.

As I have said, I’m not the fastest painter, so to complete a piece ‘en plein air’ is far too daunting a prospect. So having my sketches as a visual and emotional reference is essential.

This particular day in April, in one of my favourite woodland haunts, the trees had a burnished halo of buds ready to burst into leaf & I was enticed by their beauty; bough, branch and twig. I had with me a sturdy piece of handmade paper, made more so by the clear gesso priming which I had previously applied. I find this heavy weight paper very forgiving and I can easily rest it on a suitably sized sketchbook to work on. I like the security of sketching out what I want to paint first, graphite is easier to erase than paint. But this day I felt brave and inspired, so just plunged straight in with the watercolours; this was not going to be a sketch, but the start of a final piece.

It was really liberating working like this and I found I didn’t need my graphite guidelines as much as I had previously thought. I took a photo of the early stages that I completed in the field, just so that the initial sketch wasn’t ‘lost’ as it were. I did fall in and out of love with this painting many times during its development, but am reasonably pleased with the outcome. I like the fact that it isn’t quite as intense and detailed as some of my other work; it’s good to have a change now and again.