18 JUNE 2019 http://www.painters-online.co.uk
Stephen Coates
Meet Stephen on his stand at Patchings Art,
Craft & Design Festival. See page 77 for
festival details and turn to page 72 for
a special offer on his book, Watercolour
Enigma. Find out more about Stephen and
his work by visiting http://www.coatesart.co.ukPaint along with LP
4 Using correctly proportioned carrot
shapes, I placed my feature couple to the left
then dotted other figures into the spaces
between the lampposts. I avoided lampposts
growing out of people’s heads! The aspect of
this scene is taken at eye level. Note the
original photograph was taken by the
photographer holding his camera to his eyes
therefore the heads of all the people must
also be in a line at eye level, give or take a bit
for the varying heights of people. The top of
each carrot should be close to the horizon
line, but the size of each figure is determined
by how far down the carrot extends. All of this
applies because the pavement is horizontal.
If it were ascending or descending it would
be quite different.
t5 I utilised all the geometry and
vanishing point theory from the sketch and
created a drawing with a 2B soft pencil. It
is important not to press too hard, because
the idea is to erase everything drawn with
the pencil once the ink has been laid down.
With an accurate pencil drawing, I then set
about using my Unipin pens to sketch in all
the lines, including a little shading here
t and there. I then used a soft eraser
to remove all the pencil guidelines,
leaving me with a 100 per cent ink
impression.
Please follow me next month when
I will be showing you how I applied
the paint to this drawing to create
quite a dramatic wet scene of Venice
in beautiful warm colours.The Finished Sketch, pen and ink on Bockingford 300gsm NOT watercolour paper, 11x15in. (28x38cm). I chose Bockingford because it has
a hard size on its surface. There is considerable lifting out and cleaning off to do in the painting, which some other papers won’t allow. Please
test any paper you have before drawing all this to avoid disappointment later.tPOSITIONING THE PEOPLE