A Good Week For A Sketch Addict

Thursday 9th May

This week has seen the weather improve. My mother and I spend a day of pure bliss in the gardens of Kilmacurragh Botanic Gardens in Co. Wicklow. How can I never have heard of this lovely place? To think of all the years I spent messing around in the mountains of that very same county, just a few miles north. Happily the Gardens are still there, and the rhododendrons are in full bloom. My mother and I paint side by side in the warm sun (shade, actually, but you can’t get everything right) and the afternoon slips by unnoticed. I put my technique for blossoms to the test, with an inital study that is okay but not perfect, and then by the second sketch I feel I get the hang of it. The sketch below is just an A6 sketchbook so it’s tiny, and perfect for a full study of anything (as I hope to prove by the end of this article).

Here are the stages:

• Blobs of rich watercolour for the initial shapes. Be as close to the shape of the overall clump as possible
• Repeat for all the blossoms you want to include
• Allow to dry
• While you’re waiting, add leaves, leaving a hair’s breadth of untouched white paper between blossom and leaf to avoid colour runs
• Add branches or any dark woody stems, leaving that little gap of white paper again
• If the blossoms are dry, use a more concentrated version of the same colour to paint blossom shapes lower in the clump
• Higher up in each clump, the darker versions of the blossoms will be patchier and only where you can see the insides of trumpets
• Darken the tops of the leaves where the blossom is casting a shadow on them
• The undersides of the branches will also be darker
• Use a dark ink – something that works with the blossom colour – to outline the curve of the inside of each “trumpet”; because each flower grows away from its neighbours, this should look like three little “c” shapes with their backs to each other, with room for the frills of each flower between each
• Darken each trumpet interior, softening and blending as you get further from each little “c” shape
• When everything is dry, add the stamens, either in a white gel pen or some other appropriate colour
• This is one of my classes in my archive if you want to take it further…

Mum has a most comprehensive plein air painting kit, which is a great benefit to me, as she has rich and lovely watercolours squeezed directly from tubes into her palette, and they are fresh and new, and super quality. Mum holds the palette in her left hand, and I’m right-handed, and I am seated to her left, so it would be wrong not to pinch a few helpings of Madder Red Dark for the bases of my blossoms, hovering, as the paint is, just inches away. It makes ALL the difference and I will get my hands on some as soon as I can.

Mum tries my technique for blossoms beside me. Her use of colour is intuitive and not literal, unlike mine, which is more straightforward. I reflect on how one’s art, and one’s intuitive approach to art, is so reflective of one’s personalty, one’s soul.

Three things that I believe my art says about me:

• straightforward
• not tricky in any way
• intense

What three things does your art say about you? I mean from life, not from a (pre-chosen by someone else) photo, when you choose the subject, the composition, colours, the whole lot. Be honest!

Sunday 12th May

Marcel and I drive to Dublin and back for a long-overdue family reunion. We arrive in a leafy part of South Dublin on the street of one of my cousins; it’s one side of a square, in the middle of which is a park. We’re early, and want to take Reuben for a trot around the park (I invited him and luckily my cousin loves dogs). We pull into a space that looks like you can park there. A man with a dark red jumper knotted over his shoulders turns and stares at us. Really stares. The stare says “leave that car and I will have you reported so fast.” Marcel, who has never backed down from anyone (usually to my acute embarrassment), is out-stared by this old man and reverses slowly. The man retreats into his house, which my daughter and I say is a stupid house anyway. “That’s right,” the man in the knotted jumper is probably thinking, “go on, git. Scoot.” I am scathing. I tell Marcel he should not have given in. We park somewhere else on the square, Marcel pays for parking (even though it’s Sunday and the sign says you don’t pay on Sundays) and Reuben has a super time in the park, meeting lots of very nice dogs. Then Marcel remembers who he is and drives forty yards back to the spot he was out-stared from. We’re still a little early and he wants to wait a bit, hoping the nosy neighbour man will come out and be upset to discover he is beaten by this brave, younger, parking-ticket-possessing man. I am witnessing a clash of cultures in Marcel: the Brit who wants to obey the law vs. the Frenchman who wants to assert his dominance, both beaten by the Irishman of confidence. But the neighbour has nothing more to prove, and does not reappear.

In my cousin’s beautiful sunny patio, surrounded by a wonderfully unruly garden full of colour and perfume, I am delighted to see that all of those cousins who are currently in the country are there, and even the next generation is well represented, with beautiful young people sprung from the loins of my beautiful cousins on benches all over the sunny patio. We have fantastic exchanges with them all – I hope they found my little family as lovely as I found all of them – and after a perfectly delightful afternoon tea we go our separate ways, Marcel and I hitting the motorway back to Galway in the evening sun. It’s always a little bittersweet to see people become old and frail, but to see the fine young people of the next generation, part of the life’s work and legacy of the older folk, is deeply touching.

We stop for supplies just before home and my phone battery is dead, so while Marcel picks up things in the supermarket I sketch my SketchPocket. I have very little water in my brushes (they are nearly all empty) so I can’t clean out the colours very well between the green for the pens and the delicate shadows on the white parts. But the effect is nice all the same, and my mind stays peaceful. I am like an addict – perhaps I am only fooling myself that sketching is a healthy addiction, but soothed is soothed, and who cares how you get there, if it doesn’t damage your health or empty your bank account?

The second SketchPocket sample arrives a few days later. It’s a tiny bit bigger than the first, and holds an A5 sketchbook on one side, if you really want to bring one. It’s a bit tight though – it’s really designed for an A6 sketchbook – so we’re going to add an elastic gusset around three sides to make the A5 book slide in a little more smoothly.

There are a couple of other things we need to tweak, and the third sample will shortly be in production. I know I am the designer and creator of the SketchPocket, but I am so proud of its functionality and its lovely design. Having the bag with me all the time is the reason I am so productive as a sketcher, and every sketch from life improves my skills in some small way. Everything you see in the sketch – including, of course, a sketchbook – comes with the SketchPocket, although you only get one white gel pen, one fude pen, one ink sample and one water brush, as well as your beautiful box of paints. But you get two magnetic clips and one collapsible water container (in the back pocket) so that’s a good start!

Tuesday 14th May

I cycle to the shore near me and sketch a boat bobbing in the tide. Then I return the next evening and sketch the little white cottage on the road just acrioss from the spot where I sat to sketch the first scene. You can see it all on my YouTube channel – if you’re not yet a subscriber, and enjoy what I do, you really should subscribe, as I am a tireless sharer of sketching on location. Actually I am a bit tired, but that won’t stop me.

Wednesday 15th May

The cottage across the road from the little boat above…a couple live here and the man swims every day in what is basically his own huge swimming pool, twice a day.

Thursday 16th May

I spend a few hours in hospital having a scope. I have had it done lots of times – I have an auto-immune condition – and and I have always been fully sedated. This time I am in a different hospital and they don’t feel the need to sedate me, or not much. I am perturbed! I can feel the tube scooting around in my stomach. The staff are no doubt highly competent but it’s a bit disconcerting that they are so interested in my SketchPocket, which is lying on my chest because I use it as a handbag, and it has my phone and earphones in it: I have been listening to podcasts during my three-hour wait. The doctors and nurses go on and on about it, and suggest it could be adapted for use as a medical bag for people who need to take medicines – this makes me most indignant and I feel like saying “keep your vital life-saving medicines away from my sketching bag” but I think better of it. I want to remain on their good side. In the theatre, it is up to me to shove the bag down my body to the foot of the bed – I am surprised they don’t think of it. Surely they need my body not to have stuff on it? Just before the thing that keeps your mouth open goes in, I ask them if they’re going to sedate me and they say yes, but they don’t (or not noticeably). After I am wheeled out, the curtains around my bed are opened, and I sketch the nurses’ station. I feel all my annoyance and resentment ebb away: colour choices, timing, it all soothes, like the fulfilling of any addiction.

Soon, Marcel comes to pick me up and I tell him my tale of woe. It’s not that big a deal, really, but one doesn’t like to “be there” for umnpleasant things, if one can avoid it.

We’re watching telly later with our daughter Liv, home from Dublin after her first term at uni. She’s sympathetic about my ordeal. “Should have slipped the doctor a hundred,” says Marcel. The three of us discuss the best way to palm a couple of fifties to a doctor and how to wink correctly; none of us has ever offered a bribe, and we’re not sure of the protocol.

Friday 17th May

Liv and I head to the shore at Mulroog to sketch. I have put together a SketchPocket for Liv to use, one of my spare samples, and I’ve filled it with kit for her. There’s no one there when we arrive, it’s windy, and she hasn’t brought a coat. I am alarmed, as she has been very unwell with flu – she sounded absolutely awful over the weekend and was so ill she couldn’t attend the family reunion. I find a coat in the back of the car and soon we’re both cosy, looking for something lovely to sketch. Liv sketches a sweet little pink crab and I sketch an old favourite subject of mine, the changing tide and reflections of rocks around the edges. The sea rolls in behind the rocks in a desultory fashion, the sun comes out and we’re in heaven. Reuben barks at rocks until Liv uses her no-nonsense voice to tell him to stop, and he obeys. Then he sees some dogs and he’s away, but he’s a good little dog and he’s not causing any trouble (“all dog owners say the exact same thing” says Liv), so I leave him be. Four lively border collies, all in the care of one woman, swim and fetch balls, and there’s a man with them, who seems to be the owner of another dog in the group, a little white bichon. Things go well for a while and eventually I get up reluctantly to fetch Reuben, as the fun and games are turning a bit snarly. I walk back over the rocks with him, and one of the wet collies jumps up at me and whines – doesn’t bother me at all, but my sketch is open on the stones, and I don’t want muddy paws on it. The collie turns its attention elsewhere, and it or one of its brethren knocks down two newly-arrived toddlers who scream with shock and are taken away by their mothers, their cries soaring over the wind. We’re grateful our dog hasn’t been involved, but he doesn’t do anything wrong except cock his leg in territory marking all over my house, and anyone else’s, which is pretty bad.

As we pack up I ask Liv how she got on. She thinks I mean with the SketchPocket.

“I’d give it a 9,” she says. I realise she means my bag.

“Only a 9?” I say.

“Yes, because there’s nowhere to attach the [silicone, cone-shaped, top-heavy, collapsible] water cup.”

I explain that it’s not supposed to be attached, but to sit on a surface. She concedes the point.

“Okay, a 9.5,” she says. She doesn’t say where I lost half a point.

When we get home, Marcel asks me how Liv found the SketchPocket. “She gave it a 9.5,” I say, but Liv corrects me.

“Actually, I loved it,” she says. “In fact I was surprised how much I loved it. It was so easy to use.”

I am absolutely delighted, as Liv wouldn’t say that unless she meant it.

I hope the good public feels the same when it becomes available in August this year.

Before I leave you:

• Courses coming up:
• Learn Ink and Watercolour Through Fun Illustration, 4th-8th June (live online) https://roisincure.com/product/learn-ink-and-watercolour-through-fun-illustration-4th-8th-june/
• Urban Sketching in Galway 15th-17th August (in person) – two places left, contact me for details
• Sketching Nature’s Finds with Artform, Dunmore East, 27th-29th September: https://www.artform.ie/courses/sketching-in-september-with-roisin-cure/
• These courses are a great way to kick start your sketching practice, or augment it, and give yourself the gift of a positive addiction!
• Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel, as it is growing by the week and will have lots of instructive, educational videos this summer and beyond: https://www.youtube.com/@roisincure

Finally, I would like to thank all of you wonderful people for the support you give me all year round. You reply with lovely comments to my blog, you attend my online classes and contibute so much to the community, you drive long distances – and even fly tremendously long ones – to come and spend your precious time with me. I stop teaching weekly online classes at the end of May, but you can still enhance your art world through one of the courses I have listed above. Life as a sketcher is full of beauty, sitting out in the glory of the world, but it can be a little solitary, so your support and friendship means so much to me.

See you soon – and happy sketching!