I finished my Delft sketch today! In the past few days I worked on it a bit every day, but not a lot – for various reasons. I didn’t blog about every small step, that didn’t seem that interesting. Today I could finally start painting. Here’s the finished sketch:
Sketching with a pencil on cotton feels different from sketching on paper. Rough paper also has grain, but less regularly spaced. I had to make sure my pencil was sharp all the time, to avoid blurring. Erasing is not that easy.
So I took my paints and started painting. This time I’m not doing the obligatory light-to-dark process, I’m just picking subjects by colour and filling them in by feeling. It’s not so easy to keep the lines narrow when painting. My canvas size is 18 x 24 cm, so it’s smaller than A4.
I started with the sky, and then I moved on to mixing some nice greys for the shadows. I couldn’t resist also painting the red shutters – I will add another layer to those to liven up the colours. I’m also going to try to suggest the stone structures of the walls by adding an interesting random basic wash. This is how far I’ve gotten today, I will stop for now because my brain is tired (and if I would continue I would completely mess it up – I can tell from experience). I’m enjoying this!
