Rock Cemetery (Art & Photography)

During the virus lockdown in April I published my first art blog. I had plenty of spare time, stuck indoors, with no new photography. This led to a few ideas about how to keep the posts going including looking back at a Scotland trip in 2013 and sharing some of my artwork.

Whilst constructing a more recent blog I found the following Rock Cemetery write up in my draft folder. It contains a mixture of art and photography that wasn’t published as I pressed ahead with the Scotland photography from 2013. I also had a few reservations about posting art, as mentioned in the first art blog, and that was probably the real reason why the draft went unpublished. However, I am keen to move on with my art, going beyond copying other artists tutorials, and producing some of my own original work. Part of the process includes documenting my progress in this blog... so here goes!

Back in early March, prior to any lockdown, I was combining art with my photography. I was keen to develop a quick style of drawing and painting outdoors following the style of urban artists. Of course, that is easier said than done. Adjusting to drawing with ink pens, with no opportunity for correction, means freeing the mind and accepting the inevitable inaccuracies and failures.

The subject on this occasion was Rock Cemetery in Nottingham. I know this location from my photography and the grand Victorian gravestones, crosses and stone angels, all tightly packed in lines facing St Andrew’s church, provided an opportunity for both sketching and photography.

The artwork on the day was hampered by the cold and several rain showers condensing the drawing painting time to ten minutes or so. The aim in this time was sketching out a few ideas that I could use later at home and this is the finished work, roughly A5 size, completed in gouache*:

I limited the palette to ultra blue and burnt sienna mixed with white and black. Yellow was introduced for the greens and blue to correct the sky colour. The whole scene was under painted with blue acrylic, which streaked horribly when applied (see below). However, I did like the odd area where the under painting showed through In the final version:

This was the sketch on the day itself in ink and watercolour. Not a great outcome - the scaling is all wrong - but it set the scene for the gouache painting. Later at home I altered the composition using photos as a reference and then produced a test version on the iPad using Procreate:

The stone work around the cemetery was the main photographic subject, concentrating mainly on textures in a close format:

I wanted to represent some of the photography in my artwork and playing around with painting apps on the iPad I completed the following drawing/painting in Tayasui sketches - a mixture of the watercolour brush and the ink pen:

Overall, I like the idea of mixing the photography with various sketches and paintings on the theme of a location. I can see me doing more of this when lockdown finishes and I am currently working on my next project at the moment. I hope publishing some of my early artwork will inspire others to give art a go, remembering that the outcomes are less important than the enjoyment of the activity...which should be true for most endeavours, but is often lost in today’s results driven world!

*I didn't explain why I used gouache. Gouache is an opaque medium that can be used like watercolour. When mixed with white or black in a creamy consistency it is dense enough to cover over any underlying paint e.g. the underpainting of acrylic. However, unlike the acrylic, which is fixed when dry, gouache is reactivated by the introduction of new paint. This allows the tones to mix on the paper which was useful for the weathering effect on the gravestones and crosses. Gouache is also more forgiving than watercolour and I currently find it easier to produce an end result in this medium.