Keeping Sketchbooks E-Book

Martin Ursell

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Artists use sketchbooks for a myriad of purposes - to capture a moment, to develop an idea, to record a scene... This book advises on how to enjoy keeping a sketchbook and how to make the most of their use. With practical examples throughout, it is a beautiful and valuable guide that will inspire you to pick up a pencil or brush, mark the page and start your own visual diary. Topics covered include looking at different types of sketchbooks - their size, theme and purpose; ideas for drawing and painting in a sketchbook inside, outside or while travelling and advice on professional sketchbooks and scrapbooks. It considers all types of sketchbooks - their size, theme and purpose and gives ideas for drawing and painting in a sketchbook inside, outside or while travelling. With advice on professional sketchbooks and scrapbooks and profiles of a range of artists who provide inspiration and examples, this will appeal to artists, illustrators, designers and everyone involved in visual arts. Beautifully illustrated with 243 colour photographs.

Leseprobe

KEEPING SKETCHBOOKS

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2016 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2016

© Martin Ursell 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 109 3

Frontispiece: From left to right clockwise: Grund Station, Switzerland, Phil Carter; Golden Coconut Palm, Kew, Martin Ursell; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Aldous Eveleigh; Budapest Opera House, Andrew Baker. In these four images the overriding feeling created is one of atmosphere and a sense of place. The scarlet wash across this double by Aldous really helps convey the richness and monarchic nature of this part of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Likewise the grey green wash and almost monotone treatment of the Golden Coconut help evoke the intense humidity and mistiness of the Palm House at Kew in London. In complete contrast Phil Carter’s wonderfully atmospheric drawing of Grund Station in Switzerland looks bitingly cold and raw. I have been to this station and when I first saw this sketchbook double I was immediately transported straight back there. Phil captures this place quite brilliantly. With his pen drawing of the extremely decorative Budapest Opera House, Andrew Baker manages to give a real feeling of what it is like inside whilst using relatively few lines. This sketchbook double has a marvellous feeling of space and grandeur. Andrew makes simplifying very ornate subject matter like this look easy when in fact it is fiendishly difficult to draw in this succinct and unfussy way. One can imagine how much detail Andrew decided to leave out of this drawing, however it looks as if he has drawn everything, nothing seems to be missing.

Title page: Kings’ Sketchbook, Martin Ursell.

Dedication

For Nick Boyle and Abul Kalam, what a very wonderful time we had drawing our way around India and Bangladesh; the video bus, the bucket flush, the warm plate and the human leg warmers, the whole thing ‘a diamond chance’!

Sacred Cows, Jaipur, India by Martin Ursell.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Professor John Vernon Lord

Introduction

1Choosing a sketchbook

2Beginning a sketchbook

3Reportage: the sketchbook outside

4The travel sketchbook

5The sketchbook inside

6The professional sketchbook

7The scrapbook

8The sketchbook for sketchbook’s sake

Acknowledgements

About the author

References

Index

FOREWORD

by Professor John Vernon Lord

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958).

hen I was a first year art student in 1956 our first day was to go outdoor sketching, which we did every Monday for a year, irrespective of the weather. In those days sketchbooks formed part of your assessment. I can recall our teacher, Bill Hodgson, overwhelming me with ways of looking during those early days of art school. He would say such things as – look for the darkest and lightest aspects of what you can see; look at the shapes of the spaces in between the objects; keep an eye out for the unusual and the anecdotal; try to distinguish the various textures that you can see before you and invent ways of rendering them; look at the expressions on people’s faces, capture their body language, their gestures and hand movements; use different instruments for drawing and try drawing on different papers; try drawing on a large scale and also try drawing on a small scale; try drawing freely and try drawing tightly, but remember drawing freely isn’t necessarily the only way of experimenting, for experimenting in mark-making can be done in many different ways – ‘loosely’ and ‘tightly’! We would be encouraged to draw with just lines for some sessions and by only using tones for others. We would discuss what to leave in and what to leave out. He would talk about compositional unity and relationships between objects, about proportion, emphasis, rhythm and balance, and perspective. He made us look and listen rather than just see and hear. He gave us that feeling that ideas emerge from attempting to draw what was in front of us. He sharpened our sense of observation. He believed that looking at the world around us, and trying to interpret it by drawing and sketching, should stimulate our imagination. After looking over your shoulder at your drawing he would also say, ‘enjoy yourself’.

Sketching often implies a hurried approach to drawing. Personally I do not think this is necessarily the case.

Sketching is often defined as a quick informal drawing, often a study for a later elaboration. I notice, in the Collins English Dictionary, that the word ‘sketch’ derives from the Latin word schedius meaning ‘hastily made’ and the Greek skhedios meaning ‘unprepared’. The spirit of these verbal connections is understood but quite often a sketch might well be a carefully wrought drawing, rather than a hurried one. Definitions can sometimes be too restricting, for the same dictionary defines drawing as ‘a picture or plan made by means of lines on a surface, especially one made with a pencil or pen without the use of colour’. Well, surely this confines drawing too narrowly for drawings can equally be made with a brush or other instruments and colour can certainly be applied. The notion that a sketch might be something ‘unprepared’ (despite it being defined as a ‘plan’) is an interesting one for so often we are indeed unprepared for the outcome of a sketch. By sketching we sometimes discover things that we least expected. The very informality of the process sometimes allows us to achieve an image, which hitherto we hadn’t felt capable of before. The word ‘experiment’ comes to mind. There is also the ‘doodle’, which means ‘to scribble or draw aimlessly’, another notion of being ‘unprepared’. Spontaneity and intuition are as important as careful planning. We need to work at both.

To look at something and to commit yourself to describing it as a drawing in a sketchbook is a contemplative act. It involves sharp observation, spontaneous thinking and at the same time a commitment to make sense of what you can see.

Garages at Peterchurch and Tracebridge by John Vernon Lord. With these incredibly intricate pen drawings, John creates a world in miniature. He has chosen two ordinary garages as his subject matter and using a perfectly ordinary lined book John has managed to create something extraordinarily beautiful.

Drawing and sketching is perhaps the best way of appreciating what you are looking at. Drawing intensifies your appreciation and experience of the wonder of vision. To commit to a sketch or a drawing involves the realization that what you are looking at is more surprising than you expected. Drawings help explain things to yourself. Sketchbooks allow you to experiment and take risks, away from the formality of producing set pieces. Not all drawing is about interpreting the observed world. Much of it involves drawing from the imagination and the remembered. Keeping a sketchbook is something that allows you to be informal. A sketchbook is a kind of visual diary and a reference book. In a diary you are entitled to write whatever you want to for there is usually no intended reader. It is the same with a sketchbook. There is no pressure to produce perfect drawings in a sketchbook. You can experiment and develop ideas and discover new ways of drawing on the way. Sketching is an opportunity to make mistakes without feeling that you are a failure. Drawing or sketching is an attempt to make the ordinary look significant.

Martin Ursell’s book offers us wonderful advice about how to go about sketching. It gets us to think hard about the subject. Not only does it discuss the process of sketching but also it is a practical guide with regard to thinking about drawing instruments and the various sketchbooks that can be bought or tailor-made. The choice of the appropriate drawing instruments with the right paper, to achieve a particular outcome, is crucial. He also goes into the different purposes that sketchbooks may have, from rough notation of one’s observations to specific research. It even goes into that difficult business of ‘drawing in public’; managing to cope with people gathering around you and interrupting you as you draw. This is a practical and engaging book, by an experienced artist/illustrator, that should appeal to all those involved in the visual arts.

John Vernon Lord

Ditchling, April 2015

Shed at Tracebridge and Cradley Church by John Vernon Lord. The mind boggles at John’s incredible pen work here. These drawings have been executed with amazing skill and look almost like engravings. The balance of black and white is perfect and one reads these images immediately. Many would balk at the complexities of attempting to draw this kind of subject matter but John seems to revel in it. I think these stunning drawings have a quality that harks back to other British masters like John Minton and his Young Man Asleep in a Barn and Paul Drury’s etching titled September 1928. In turn in both of these pictures the artists conjure the brilliance of Samuel Palmer and his evocation of an English rural ideal.

What’s it all about? By John Vernon Lord. I think John would call this illustration a doodle. With his extraordinary pen work John has produced something with the intricacy of an engraving. The depth and range of tones created with only a black line is awe-inspiring.

INTRODUCTION

n thinking how to begin this introduction it occurs to me that there are many ways that one might begin and further that this is rather like how one may embark on keeping a sketchbook. The one common theme in keeping a sketchbook, and perhaps the most essential point, is that they are personal and need to satisfy the requirement and purpose of the keeper, especially if they are to endure and flourish.

The first proper sketchbook I remember keeping was, as a child, an A3 Rowney cartridge pad, with a dull red cover and glued binding. I took it with me on a family holiday to Tunisia and filled it with drawings of the exotica, palms, people sunning themselves, the Kasbah and of course the local sights. I must have used an extremely soft pencil, a 4B or even 6B, something I would never use now, because the drawings became pages of grey fog (I knew nothing of the wonder of fix), and because it had a glued binding most of the pages came loose so that their edges got curled and torn where they protruded from the covers. When squirrels gnawed into our attic, several years ago, they made an enormous dray out of bite sized pieces of this book and other stored drawings so my first sketchbook is no more.

Sketchbook keeping was a compulsory part of my student days at Chelsea School of Art and except for a period of about nine years, between graduating and returning to art school as a visiting lecturer, I have always had a sketchbook on the go. Rather like keeping a diary, which I have never done, they are filled, almost exclusively, with observational drawings of where I have been and what I have seen and they are very useful things; catalogues of drawings that I can and do refer to when working as an illustrator. Usually nobody but me will see them yet I do care very much how they look and that I keep going with them. Why this should matter to me is because somehow or other keeping a sketchbook has become an integral part, not just of my success as an illustrator but also a way of recording day-to-day events and experiences, a visual diary in fact. However these are my sketchbooks and it is a misconception, held by many, that a sketchbook must be full of drawings and further that one must be good at drawing in order to keep a sketchbook at all. As is evident from the profiles throughout this book there are countless ways to keep a sketchbook. That is the whole point.

Martin Ursell at Mauna Ulu, Big Island.

Why bother to keep a sketchbook at all? Well, if one likes making imagery, doodling, drawing, jotting down ideas, or recording the things one sees or hears, making notes of colours that go together well, or collecting together thoughts and impressions of a place then there is a distinct advantage in knowing that they are all collected together in one place. A book with pages in will almost certainly take up less space than loose sheets of paper or backs of envelopes, which unless later collected together, will be either lost, damaged or just very difficult to find. The order of pages, which is integral to any book, offers further possibilities for the creative mind that loose ephemera does not. So already we are amassing an attractive list of reasons as to why one might bother with a sketchbook and we have only just started.

Now, if one visits a good art shop in almost any city of the world the choice of sketchbooks is truly enormous, I think in a way that it did not used to be thirty years ago. Although maybe this is to do with the kind of shop I felt able to visit as a student and my pitiful budget; whatever, sketchbooks now are readily and reasonably cheaply available and there must be one to suit every need. They are easy to buy. Seductively sitting on the shop’s plan chests with gorgeously patterned covers embellished with Italian or French marbling and filled with crisp white paper from Egypt, Ireland or India. It is very easy indeed to end up with drawers full of blank sketchbooks.

Rather like a musical instrument that needs to be played, a sketchbook only really becomes a sketchbook when it is used and this book, hopefully, will help you with this process. It sounds a simple thing, and indeed what could be difficult about using a sketchbook?

CHAPTER 1

Six sketchbooks by Aldous Eveleigh, not really even the top most tip of the iceberg, for Aldous has literally hundreds of sketchbooks. I once asked a friend of Aldous’s what kind of sketchbook he preferred and the answer came back, ‘anything! Aldous will draw in anything’. The open sketchbook shows a drawing made in Rome, Italy and is literally bursting with life, colour and atmosphere.