Back street in Varanasi, India
Pen and watercolour sketch, done from photo I took in 2019. This is a scanned image of the original painting, done on good-quality drawing paper. I’m not completely happy with the reproduction. The darks aren’t as dark as they should be, and the yellow of the building was somewhat dull. I couldn’t rectify the darkness without introducing “noise” to the image, but I did find that adjusting the red balance (increasing it) helped with the yellow.
Verandah Greenery: crosshatching and negative space
Another from David Morales’ course – for details see below.
This and the garlic are done in Uni Pin penson 180g/m2 drawing paper sketchbook. This paper is thick enough that I can use pen on both sides without any ink coming through.
These are plants in the garden in front of the verandah railing. They are from the plantain family (same as bananas), and called parrot’s plantain.
Garlic crosshatch exercise
I’ve been following David Morales’ Illustrated Diary: Fill Your Sketchbook with Experiences from Domestika. This is one of the exercises I did on examining an object from several angles. I’ve learned more about using crosshatching on this course (mine was rather haphazard before) – very useful for onsite sketching.
Rainy Day in Hyderabad
I’m running out of good-quality watercolour paper, and Phuket is not the place for sourcing decent watercolour paper and paint. I’ve been wanting to develop a rainy day scene for sometime, and have been following a few videos on YouTube… but you really need the pigments to spread out and merge and soften around the edges. And you can only do that on not just high-quality paper, but also the right sort of paper.
So while I compare prices of buying paper online (and worry if I will be charged customs duty on overseas deliveries), I dug out an old drawing book and did an ink sketch. I then filled in with some washes of colour. I’m quite pleased with the result.
I took the original photo in Hyderabad, India, in October 2018.