Church in Detmold, Germany

[Balaji]

Pen & ink sketch and watercolour washes, size approximately 4" x 5", time taken: approximately 10 minutes for the ink sketch, sixteen months ago, and around 15 to 20 minutes for the addition of colours a couple of days ago. I used a reference photo for the initial sketch, but not when I added the washes.

 

[Joy]

Wonderful sketch in just 10 minutes. Amazing that you could do such quality work so quickly.

 

[Triduana]

I love this! I like the expressive lines, especially the trees.

 

[Balaji]

Wonderful sketch in just 10 minutes. Amazing that you could do such quality work so quickly.

Thank you Joy.

I think it would take me longer if were to draw the same scene from life, since I would need to make many decisions while sketching. In this case I was looking at a reference picture where decisions on framing, and composition had already been taken, and the image was also already in 2D.

What made me explore the idea of doing these quick sketches was this YouTube series by Stephen Travers. I thought the idea to do such sketches was a good one and I decided to tackle the same subjects (using Stephen's reference pictures, but without looking at his final output. I did watch his first few videos in this series to see how he went about it, and in particular, what level of detail he was aiming for.

Here is the link to his video of the Church in Detmold, Germany

 

[Balaji]

Thank you Kay. I learnt to do trees this way from Stephen Travers' YouTube demos. I used to sketch trees differently, in a time consuming way.