Stories from my Sketchbook . . .

I’ve been practicing perspective again—what I see is definitely not what I get on paper.  (Or perhaps it is. Perhaps it is my eyesight that is off?)  Anyway, I liked the quintessential ‘English-ness’ of the photo below, so decided to copy it.

It turned out to be quite a challenge—but not because of the perspective (I’ll keep practicing.)  The challenge came because I seriously stuffed-up the water-colour version of the window-box flowers—and it all turned into a horrible muddy mess.  Sigh. Watercolour is hard.  Bearing in mind that I had promised myself that I would no longer rip pages willy-nilly out of my sketchbook whenever I got the huff with whatever I was working on, I decided to play around in my ‘toy box’ of artist materials to see if I could remedy the situation.

Gesso is my now new best friend.  I had a large pot of it in a drawer (which had never been opened and had probably been there for years) and as I really had no idea how to use it, I just started experimenting.  The picture was stuffed anyway—what harm could it do?  I discovered (after a couple of less-than-stellar attempts) that using the gesso allowed me to literally ‘paint over’ my muddy mess, and if I added colour to it as well I not only got great texture but also an end result that kinda-sorta resembled a mass of flowers.  Who’da thunk?

(I also discovered that one of the drawbacks of using gesso in a sketchbook was that these two pages stuck together every time I shut my sketchbook for the next two weeks—but we seem to have got past that small hindrance now, so it’s all good.)

All hail the ‘happy accident’.  Thank you Bob Ross.  🙂