✏️ Shades of Summer
Documenting seasons one drawing a day
📖 The Quote
‘I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. Colour helps to express light - not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.’ — Henri Matisse
✏️ The Sketch(es)
Step 1. Grab a new sketchbook or your iPad. This will be your ‘Summer Sketchbook’.
Step 2. Pick 3 colours to create your colour palette and constrain your sketches.
Choose these 3 colours based on your own emotions - as Matisse said: ‘When I paint green, it doesn’t mean grass, when I paint blue, it doesn’t mean sky.’
Step 3. Choose a theme (trees, sun and shadow, people…) or simply document your surroundings, urban sketching style.
The intention is to do a drawing a day. At the end of the Summer season you’ll have a nice memory to complement any photographs: a sketchbook.
💡 Some Ideas
Seasonal sketchbooks are a unique and personal way to journal your holidays, trips or special events.
Summer will be soon coming to an end, but there’s still time to sketch your surroundings. Either if you are travelling somewhere special or staying in at home in the town you live in, it is a rewarding endeavour to document the different events and seasons. And for that, you don’t need to be a professional artist, it’ the emotional content that builds your personal sketchbook, not the skilled drawings in it!
Try constraining each of your seasonal sketchbooks to a different colour palette and media.
Constraints are always an excellent practice for every creative project. Constraining our practice forces our eyes to synthesise information and to expand on a focused framework. If you use different media and colour for each sketchbook, you’ll then be able to practice with a variety of techniques, with each of them associated to a memory.
Use colour conceptually. Paint ‘the difference between things’.
You could constrain the set of drawings to 3 colours and then experiment with various colour schemes: complementary colours, monochromatic shades, cold and warm tones, etc. Each colour palette can convey different emotions and information, and not necessarily be a translation of reality1. Colour can express warmth, cold, hope, light and shadow, hope, sadness, vibrancy...
🖼 The Artist
Christoph Niemman’s travel drawings are fantastic. His 2022 Summer Drawings, in particular, are a great example of everything mentioned before: documenting special trips, using different reduced but strong colour palettes and drawing with consistency.
💫✏️
Happy sketching!
Ana
Have you been sketching this week? It would be great to hear about it! Please, leave a comment and share your thoughts down below :)
What is reality, in any case? We all see (feel) differently - as Hockney puts it, we see with memory.