Saturday 17 June 2017

Sketch Crawl : Mouth of the Ouseburn


























Ouseburn Barrage
(Mixed media in A4 sketchbook)

Time to catch up on our most recent Sketch Crawl - Saturday, 10th June at the mouth of the Ouseburn.

The weather was unkind yet again, refusing to maintain the decent sunny spell of the days leading up to the Sketch Crawl and offering instead some light rain. As a consequence, last minute changes were made to the meeting point and when I got to The Cycle Hub, rather than the Tyne Bar, there was Allan sitting outside, but under cover, drawing a view of the bridges up the Tyne.

In the Hub cafe were Mike and Richard, half way through a breakfast coffee, so I joined them and did a bit of catching up.

After a while the rain moved away, so we set about getting down on paper what we could in the time before more arrived. There was a set of huge green floats in the Ouseburn that really took my fancy and would have made quite a simple subject, but without turning my sketchbook sideways I couldn't find a composition. And yes, some people would just turn their sketchbook sideways, but not me.

The Barrage presented a much more intriguing but potentially more demanding subject and it wasn't long after starting it that I began to think I'd bitten off more than I could chew. And yet ... it all started to come together when first I added some colour with brush pens, then seated in the shelter of the viaduct used coloured pencils to force it to work. The watercolour was added at home to finally make me happy with it.

Next time : 29th July is WorldWide SketchCrawl Day, so I think we'll be aiming to join in that. Stay tuned.

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