Martha Anne

Big changes in my sketchbooking life this May. I've been bringing a tiny set of watercolours everywhere with me. Though I'm not really much of a painter (yet!), I am enjoying having the means to easily make a record of the colours I'm seeing. My regular sketchbooks are absolutely not a good surface for watercolour but there's something quite freeing about using the wrong tools.

The weather has been really good where I am the past few weeks, so I've been using my lunchbreaks at work to sit outside and draw boats in the harbour. Which, by the way, is really difficult! I've not spent much time drawing boats before and I feel like my brain gets hot like a laptop with the effort of observation. Anyway,it's been a delightful way to spend time and I hope I'll be doing lots more of it. Ask me again in a year and perhaps I'll be able to draw boats on autopilot.

Today I thought I'd have a go at some master copy colour studies, inspired by this video.

I used coloured pencils rather than paint, which is possibly not in the spirit of the exercise. It was a challenge to try and recreate oil paintings in a totally different medium - but I had so much fun making these that I did 3 in a row (the rare blessing of free time!).

You can tell I'm drawn to bright colours and high contrast, but what was most interesting was being forced to notice the areas of muted colour in each of these images. They help the saturated areas glow. If nothing else, this was worth doing for the time spent paying attention to each painting :)