Summer 01: 14/01/2023

We're a week in to the new year and I'm excited to get started with Sellisternian! If you missed last week's section then you can catch up on The Big Idea here and this week I'll be following the process that I practised in The Dry Run.

Bit of a sore start to the week, I have endometriosis and the cramps had come for me in force! But I'm used this and knew better than to drag myself to my desk. I had my Sofa Sketchbook, laptop and some A3 watercolour taped to a board within reach so when I felt up to it I could do a bit of something. Between naps, of course. I did the drawing for a watercolour you'll see later, putting in a lot of the groundwork with coloured fineliners.

I'd already decided that I would start with the Summer trio and started with some thumbnails and notes in the Sofa Sketchbook. I picked summer because my overall vision for it is of overwhelming overgrowth and big pillowy florals with a lot of the figure obscured and an unrestrained colour palette. It's lower hanging fruit than my vision for the other seasons and here in January I could probably do with some summery painting as it rains outside.

Soon I was feeling a lot better and ready to set up to take some reference photos. Here's my very professional photography set up and yes I've put down foam gym flooring in my bedroom, don't knock it until your tootsies have tried it. My tripod came with a little clicker to connect to your phone for hands off photo taking, how futuristic! Here's some of the shots I took, lots of jigsaw pieces to work with. For the floral elements I took out a bunch of old sketchbooks, rather than trying to capture 'real' flowers I wanted to draw my flowers on a bigger scale.

I taped my three A1 130gsm sheets of paper to big canvas boards, cracked out the black and grey polychromos pencils and got started. Working from thumbnails, my reference photos and old sketchbooks. I'm still wrapping my head around drawing so big and even for sketches the proportions of the portrait elements were a bit wild! Although with head sized blooms how can you even tell?

The real treat came next, inking the sketches. After messing about with photos and pencil sketches I was happy to have a brush in hand and there's nothing quite like pushing around pitch black ink. The ink sketches don't really resemble what I'm aiming for (which will be very patterned and colourful) but this stage is soooo helpful for seeing what I can do with the size of the sheet and how the different elements will play out across the triptych.

I put all three on the wall to get a better look and Crowley the cat was not impressed that I was climbing around the sofa with big flappy paper while she was napping. But I had all the info I needed to go in to Clip Studio Paint on my tablet and make the outlines for my final pieces. They're very bare bones but they'll help me keep my proportions under control, hopefully! And while I was making them I was thinking about all the lovely details I could put in on the final sheet so I'm feeling motivated moving forward.

My plan is to put aside a week each for these paintings and I'll talk about the individual compositions as they're rendered and then I can reflect on the Summer trio as a whole. Then we'll start the whole process again for the Autumn trio! But for this week I'm very happy with the ground work that I've put in place.

I finished that A3 watercolour I drew while I was ill at the start of the week and he now lives happily on my bedroom wall along with Ranni. I've recently started listening to Ghost, a metal band that has a whole storyline and cast of characters that their music follows and this is their Cardinal Copia.

I also started a new sketchbook for landscapes, A2 this time and actually landscape in format which is not my usual. I'll do a full line up when it's filled but here's the first two offerings. Not much to say yet, it's still early days and I'm still wrapping my head around not working in portrait format! This one very much follows on from my Acrylic 2022 sketchbook.

Thursday was also the first 2023 session for the Galashiels Studio Club, which I joined in the Autumn. It's been great to poke my head out of my comfort zone every week and spend a couple of hours working alongside friendly fellow mess makers. This week was a bit different as I was facilitating a wee workshop focusing on drawing trees so I had to be a bit more awake than I usually am after 6pm! But it was good fun, lots of new year energy in the room and I appreciated so many people braving the rain to join in. We have a sitter coming next week so we can do some portraiture which will be grand practice for me.

Alright, it's Friday evening and I'm signing off. I'll update next Saturday and link it below when it's up. If it's not linked then thank you for reading this so early and have a great week!