I want to tell you a story about colour. A colourful story, if you will.
When I first started sketching, I was a bit “AI” about it, a bit of a computer. My process was as follows: 1. Look at the scene. 2. Record the shapes you see with a pen. 3. Now colour them in. I didn’t feel bad about the results – in fact I am one of those people who thinks everything they have just finished is amazing, the best sketch ever, only to come back to it a week later and think, meh. That’s not so hot after all. So when I made colour decisions I didn’t question what I did at the time, or only slowly, long afterwards, over a long time. Then I would see the work of colleagues in the sketching world and be mesmerised by the drama and glory of their art, and start puzzling my own work over. Little by little, a combination of their brilliance and the quiet background churning of the cogs of my own brain came together to make my voice as clear and distinctive as theirs. Colour was a huge part of that.
Looking back over earlier sketches, I see much evidence of simply “colouring in” the lines. Indeed, I always described myself as more of a colourer-in than a watercolourist. Those early sketches tried faithfully to reproduce the colours I saw, even though i was aware of the difference in drama and glory between my work and that of others. This isn’t to say I was envious – au contraire, I was inspired – just that a little voice somewhere deep inside me was saying “you’re not quite where you want to be…yet”.
Luckily, those colleagues helped me get to where I wanted to be, either wittingly or unwittingly. Does writing a guide book count as wittingly? When I read Felix Scheinberger’s Urban Watercolour Sketching nearly ten years ago, I was taken aback by the drama and glory I found within. Going back for a second read allowed me to think about what made Felix’s work so impressive, or some of it. I felt that Felix had turned up the volume on his colour in order to achieve the same amount of impact that the real world does just by existing. From that point on, I tried to “turn up the volume” on colour – intensifying and exaggerating it.
A few years later, I taught a sketching workshop in Galway with Inma Serrano from Seville and Miguel Herranz from Barcelona. As Inma and I were doing a recce before it kicked off, we gazed across the River Corrib towards the houses of the Long Walk. The grassy promontory of the pier filled much of the scene. “I ask myself, what’s the dominant colour here?” said Inma, “and then I run with it.” Next thing I knew, she had made a crazy, grass-heavy sketch that was just so unique and unlike the offerings of the vast majority of artists who had done that scene (and they are legion).
I am a slow learner – I could have learned faster if I had attended workshops, but I did not – and it eventually dawned upon me that I was the mistress of my own use of colour. Nowadays I walk a balance between reality and fantasy when I use colour.
In class on Saturday 18th February we’ll talk about colour, and turning up the volume, and harmony, and being daring with colour. I hope you’ll join me.
