Exercise 7

There and back again

With sketchbook in hand, go on a journey and document the experience.

Depending on your circumstances this might be a regular commute from one end of town to the other on the bus, a short holiday, or a day trip. Wherever you decide to go, produce at least three drawings or illustrations that say something about your experience of setting out on your journey, your destination, and your travel home. You may want to use more drawings to illustrate some of the stages in between.

So it was coming up to the Easter weekend and we was travelling to my brothers on Easter Sunday for a BBQ by car. Now I normally drive but on this occasion I asked my cousin if he would drive so I could sketch in the back seat whilst travelling. I continued as I have done in this section with Procreate and using digital media, to experiment with different brushes and textures.

I managed to sketch a rough view from looking through from the back of the car out the front windscreen. I found it quite difficult sketching whilst moving along in a car, but I did what I could at the time, I used the sketching brushes and the peppermint brush. I straightened up some of the lines when we got to my brothers and went over some of the fainter lines too.

Whilst we were at my brothers there was some lovely daffodils on the table, so I sketched these in the same brush, again it wasn’t perfect but I think I got the gist of the flowers ok. My brother and sister in law had bought me a Lindt bunny for Easter, so straight away I decided to draw this too! Again it is just a rough sketch, but I think I caught the outline ok.

They also had an Easter tree which was decorated on the sideboard, so during the afternoon I sketched this too, surprisingly I found this not too bad, and think I sketched it well.

We then went out side and played with Daisy the dog in the garden, my nephews were playing ball with her, so then I attempted to sketch her in the garden, with the trampoline to one side, the bushes and the balls on the grass.

When then got the BBQ out to get ready for dinner, so whilst I had a moment to myself I sketched the BBQ in the garden on the patio, with the trampoline behind and the washing line to one side. The trampoline was a bit off, but I like the patio I think the perspective was quite good.

Once we were ready to leave, I then sat in the back seat again this time behind the drivers side so I could get a different view out of the front window for the trip home and some sketching.

It was so tricky trying to draw the cars as we was going along, but most cars are similar shapes, so if one disappeared it wasn’t long before another came along at the side or front, so the cars are less detailed as I focused just on the shapes. I added in the steering wheel afterwards to show the aspect from the driver view.

I then went back over the first illustration to add some texture and colour. I tried out some different brushes to experiment with the textures. I worked with Panda, 6B pencil, Syrup, Eaglehawk, Blotchy, Charcoal block, Tawny, Honeyeater, Snow gum, Swordgrass, Water bleed.

Although these didn’t turn out to be the best illustrations, it gave me an idea of how to sketch digitally quickly, I think the sketches were more successful than the painted piece, but I was just testing out the textures here as a rough copy.

I enjoyed this exercise but I did find it quite challenging, but it was nice to draw different things I normally wouldn’t try, so I went out of my comfort zone, and of course working in Procreate for sketching was again fairly new for me.