Author Archives: David Bellamy

Sketching and drawing with watersoluble pencils

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This post is in response to Michael Bailey’s comments about the Karisma aquarelle pencils – marvellous watersoluble pencils that were so useful for sketching in all weathers as you can lay on the pencil tone and brush water across it to create lovely washes in various degrees of tone. They enabled you to create lovely, moody pencil sketches and drawings.

The rough sketch on the left was done with a medium Karisma pencil many years ago. It shows an ice cave in the Argentiere glacier, with great blocks of ice fallen by the entrance, and gives a fair idea of the variety of tones you can achieve with a watersoluble graphite pencil. You can clearly see the vertical pencil hatching on the side of the large horizontal ice slab where it has not quite washed out.

When the Karisma range sadly disappeared off our art-shop shelves we looked around for a replacement, and after some experiments found the Caran D’Ache Technalo range to be a good alternative. Like Karisma, the Technalo watersoluble pencils come in a range of three: HB, B and 3B, to give you a light, medium and dark tone.

Thanks for your kind comments, Michael – I hope this helps. I don’t, by the way, normally use these pencils with watercolours to produce paintings as some graphite will always wash off and muddy up the colour, although I have used them as an exercise in one of my earlier books to show tone and then applied light washes to help illustrate a point. They are excellent tools for learning about tones.

Eilean Donan Castle as a watercolour monochrome painting

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Many inexperienced artists find that coming to terms with tones, colour mixing and the myriads of other complications with watercolour painting is so overwhelming that they almost feel like giving up. If you suffer from this syndrome then try working in monochrome for a while. This will greatly improve your tonal evaluation and get you back on the rails once more.

By using just one colour throughout the painting you can concentrate on getting the tones right and not have to concern yourself with any of that nasty colour mixing that confounds so many. As usual, build up the watercolour starting with the lightest tones and gradually bringing in the darker ones. Try a dark colour such as indigo, Payne’s grey, burnt umber or warm sepia, though I have to be in a truly bad mood to use the latter as it’s such a depressing colour.

The painting shown above shows the Eilean Donan castle in the Western Highlands of Scotland, which was featured in one of my very early books. It was carried out on tinted paper and is a lovely example of creating a landscape composition without resorting to colour. Monochrome also has the advantage of creating a sense of unity and mood. After a few monochromes try adding a second colour, gradually bringing in more colours once you feel more confident.

There is a useful section on monochrome painting in my paperback Learn to Paint Watercolour Landscapes available from http://davidbellamy.co.uk/

Waterfalls and rocks in watercolour

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Waterfalls make marvellous subjects for the landscape painter, and are often close to the road, as is this one, the Ogwen Falls in Snowdonia, one of my favourites. As they are marked on Ordnance Survey maps of 1:50,000 scale they tend to be easy to find. These falls are spectacular, but rather complicated for the inexperienced artist, with so many rocks and separate cascades of tumbling water. You need to leave out many of these, keeping it simple by only including the most shapely and important rocks. If you go there after half a day of heavy rain most of these rocks will be submerged anyway.

Bear in mind that when painting waterfalls the secret is to create effective contrasts: those of hard-edged rocks sticking out of the water, or where the water tumbles behind them, and also the soft edges of falling water. The other type of strong contrasts is that of the white, aerated water crashing down beside the dark, wet rocks, but watch out for those rocks that escape the splashes and perhaps have a little colour to relieve the overall black and white effect. I always like to include some vegetation in a waterfall painting, as it breaks up the mass of rocks and cliffs, and can add a little colour to the scene.

This watercolour is featured in my exhibition currently taking place at Siop-y-Siswrn in Mold, a few leagues into North Wales to the west of Chester. It covers not just mountain scenery, but gentler pastoral landscapes and coastal scenes. The gallery is open every day except Thursday and Sunday, from 9.30 am to 4.30 pm, at 6 – 8 New Street, Mold, Clwyd. The telephone number for Siop-y-Siswrn is 01352 753200

Drawing action figures

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One of my great enjoyments is drawing and painting the figure, especially the one in action. Life drawing is the finest way of improving your drawing skills, and even now I wish I could do more. During my years of active caving figure work became more important, for without the figure in a cave you get no sense of scale. Sometimes we posed for each other in some climbing/caving position, but some of the best work I did involved catching views of cavers as they struggled through difficult features of the passage. For some reason many seemed reluctant to maintain a difficult pose when perched 80 or 100 feet above a sheer drop with their only means of support being that of thrusting their limbs out to jam themselves in position: no holds, and smooth wet rock. For the artist such a pose can be so dynamic, so tense, and with a look of absolute concentration on the model’s face. Jenny was especially good at it.

To the left is a page out of my sketchbook, showing a caver preparing for a rope-climbing competition, an excellent time to get all manner of models. I draw rapidly, making many mistakes, but every now and then one will succeed. many are abandoned as the model moves away from a certain pose, but with perseverance and practice you will find it becomes easier. Usually the model repeats poses, so that you can go back to an earlier unfinished drawing and continue.

In a caving environment I often have to work so fast that as cavers move through the passage I only have time to do a leg or arm, so end up with the left leg of one caver, the right of another, the nose of a third, and so one……great fun! It’s a bit of a problem when someone says afterwards “You’ve caught me really well there,” knowing full well that not only was that someone else’s left whatsit, but that someone else was of the opposite sex!

At the moment I’m working on artwork for the next Llandoddies book which is crammed with action figures, not to mention a few monsters, so all this practice and recording is paying dividends. I try to capture characters at all opportunities – the London underground is an excellent place, cafes and restaurants also make fine ambush points, and any large event where you can wander around and do some candid sketching. So naturally, it always pays to have that sketchbook on you, perhaps hidden within the pages of The Times or Playboy, as the mood suits you. It’s quite surprising the number of monsters that you come across in your day-to-day travels!

Creating space & distance in landscape paintings

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One aspect of landscape painting that causes a few problems for the less experienced artist is that of suggesting a sense of space and distance. This is especially a problem where the air is clear and you can see everything in outstanding detail for miles, thus tempting us to put everything into the composition, in quite strong detail. We usually need to create something of an atmospheric haze, sometimes within a short distance, in order to create a feeling of depth and space in a painting.

The key to creating a feeling of distance in a landscape painting is to ensure that the more distant feature has less detail, less colour strength and less tonal strength than that which it is in front of that feature. In this small part of a watercolour you can see that the left-hand mountain slope is quite a bit stronger in tone and detail than the ridge disappearing behind it, and this applies to trees, buildings and all manner of features. Make sure that there is very little detail in the more distant feature as it goes behind the closer one, otherwise this will confuse matters.

The above picture is part of my painting of Glen Feshie, in the Cairngorms of the Scottish Highlands, and is currently on display in my exhibition at Lincoln Joyce Fine Art, at 40 Church Road, Great Bookham, Surrey. Telephone 01372 458481, which continues until the 22nd October