Before the lens… (by sarah)
There was the brush...
I took a little set of travel water colour paints and a sketch book with me to South Africa, and I painted, generally from memory. I also sketched in pen bits I saw around me especially when the camera kept running out of battary!
Lynn an Lionel's garden or a montage of bits of it anyway 🙂
I know you are all eager to see the photos of penguins and lions but I thought I would share the paintings and the non-annotated pen sketches. Turns out I can't help but keep a field book and I will confess I had to keep reminding myself that correct angle and scales were not needed for photographs either!
Here at least are some paintings of Mary's animal friends 😉
Now I wasn't taking particular care with the paintings, or sketches part of it is trying to over come my fear of being watched when creating art. I loose my ability when I feel I am being scrutanised.
On the plane I looked out of the window and imagined what it was going to be like - I looked at the layered sky and tried to hold the image until we got to the hotel. I also tried to think of what symbolised the journey.
Also I am still learning how to paint water colours - still learning how to paint and draw one handed (though I am determined to get left hand back properly at some point!).
There were lots of plants and flowers and landscapes to paint. Alot just at the house itself.
I found myself thinking of the exquisite pictures that Darwin and other naturalists produce and whilst at Lynn and Lionel's I read a book about whales by artist Noel Ashton. I know I can not produce those sorts of images at least not without taking a long long time on each and then colouring pencils would be my choice. But I wont to learn water colours and I want to get better at live drawing and quick drawing - to get my freedom of the mad dash image back.
I like doing precise things but also to just take the impression and the feel of the thing. I love mucking around with styles and mainly I was aiming to just capture the essence of the day.
The Aquarium offered me birds as well as fish and a rookie mistake with a flat battery and no camera.
I loved the variety of shapes and colours everywhere - I was worried I'd have a large seizure and forget it all, all this wonder so I set about capturing as much of it as I could - I took nearly 2000 photos!!!
Cowfish are yellow by the way but I only had a green pen on me for the sketching. I had a limited pallet with the water colours too but that was fine really.
And of course there are a couple of kids stories I have written which I feel can only be illustrated by a certain style of water colour painting and so I need to learn how to paint that style.
I also wrote a few more whilst out there and had ideas for even more!
Rocks of course feature heavily in the painting, drawings and photography - well I am a geologist by training... love.
This ammonite mug was my favourite coffee mug and was there most of the time I was painting.
This is a cycad or "dinosaur tree" it is not the best but I can tell what it is and I put dots underneath it as we saw many cycads on the day we had our faces painted.
If we ever manage to get back to South Africa - something we would all dearly love then I would also take my sketching pencils and my mapping pens/fine liners (as well as a spare battery for the camera and a back up camera!).
Catching the mood also meant being inspired by the place and one such place was the Redemption Cafe in the Biscuit Mill. I loved the skull prints they had on the walls and it got mixed up with the surfing Jean had done as we talked over lunch.
The image was a montage of thoughts that wanted to be together.
There were things we did not manage to do and see including getting to the Cradle of Mankind and a few more sanctuaries and we hardly touched the museums, galleries or theatre stuff.
Textures can be hard to achieve in water colours I find so I did quiet a bit of experimenting - mainly at the side of the pages but I did do a few pictures that were all about texture.
Some paintings had multiple layers of wet and dry paint which reduced how quickly I could produce the image I wanted.
I painted the mood of sunset below the mountain in front of a wonderful pizza place. But most of the paintings where merges and mixes of what I had seen, I have taken many photos which I plan to paint more detailed and accurate images from now that I am back in the UK.
But I still have a head full of images so am still painting straight from the brain!
I would have liked a chance to find more local literature to read or listen too 🙂 I read most of a collection of Speculative Fiction which contained local authors and will be ordering a copy if I can to finish it.
Even without getting to galleries etc... we saw some amazing artworks but more on them later 🙂
Art and Craft, Events and Outings, Sarah, South Africa, Travelling | sarah | 
Sun 14th Aug 2016 10:02 pm
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