October 11, 2013

Sketching the North Coast

So I took a trip up the North coast last week as the weather was absolutely stunning. I wanted to get some sketches of the Giants Causeway and Carrick-A-Rede rope bridge before the weather becomes unforgiving. I am out of my comfort zone here but it's good to challenge yourself. I thought it would be good to show my initial drawings where I don't know what i'm doing yet. I need to get the feel of the landscape and figure out how I am going to tackle these large masses of rock! I thought it was best to start with a singe flower head as a warm up exercise. Start small and progress onto bigger things!

Below, I have started sketching Carrick-A-Rede in black. I always draw onto tracing paper. I use my black drawing as a master copy to base the sketch on. When I want to draw another colour, I place another piece of tracing paper on top and sketch where I want the other colour to be. This is how I prepare all my screen printing sketches.

This layer is my grassy area and I have used a thick black water colour pencil to get a grainy effect. I will later change this colour to green in photoshop.

This was my first version, but I think there is too much colour going on.

Because I primarily screen print all my sketches I am always thinking of the amount of 'layers' involved in a design. If I am using the image for a tea towel I will generally stick to 2 colours at the most however this one below looks like it might have 3.