Stick and Stones

Stick and Stones and Bones and Ink and things...

Drawing in the Pyrenees in Spain, with the Artists for Nature Foundation in 2002, my wildlife art hero, Robert Bateman once said; "I found this stick. It is not an outstanding stick! It is just any old stick and broke it off. I've done this before. I often..., I don't bring a pen. I just wait until I see what is around to draw with and you get these happy accidents so that I move the stick around I not ever sure if it is going to be three lines, or one line, or a smudge, or I could rub areas with it, but the point is it is varied and surprising." He also says; "A great teacher once said in order to learn how to draw you have to make at least ten thousand mistakes. Get busy and start making them!"


It has been a little while, now. I need to get back into my drawing. So, I need to go make some mistakes! What better way to do that, than to draw with a stick and a stone. So unpredictable, might provide a surprise or two. So here goes... drawing without traditional materials, no pen, no pencil, no brush...


Something interesting to draw... a few days ago, I popped into my local museum, the Castle Museum Norwich, to take some snaps of bones in the natural history department. A fossil skull of a thunder-bird (an extinct giant) and  a skull of a polar bear caught my eye. I printed out the photos in black & white.

Today, I selected from my garden some natural materials to draw with; a dry stick, some pebbles, some dry birch bark  and soft wood I'd collected some time ago from Mousehold Health, even some egg shells saved from the kitchen.

The question... do I try some mark-making first to see how these will work with some black ink? Or, do I go for the varied and surprising approach. Of course, I want to get straight into it.

My first drawing looks a little tentative to me. An outline drawn with stick. A few smudges and varied marks with bark. But basically a line-drawing...

Time for another go. This time, I gone straight into some darks by putting in a black background. That will stop the appearance of an outline..!

This is definitely more tonal and more three-dimensional. It also looks more scary! Or do I mean gory? Proportions are not perfect but then this is a free-hand drawing, so that's okay. Big teeth. It is definitely a monster!

Over all, I am quite pleased. I will certainly try this technique again. It should be a great technique for some field sketching. I may look for more varied natural materials to work with... a pine cone, sponge, feathers, those egg shells I didn't use. Or perhaps, I should just wait to look around to see what to draw with, just as Robert Bateman would do.


A final thought - one for the future. I have seen similar ideas in books, using charcoal instead of manufactured ink. As a dry powdery material, I would guess a stick or a stone would be less effective than something softer, say a finger-tip, a bundle of grass, feathers, just something to smudge. Perhaps a hard or sharp tool could be used to scratch away an image from the smudged charcoal. And of course, charcoal comes as a ready made stick for lines.

Urban Sketching in Norwich

Joining in with a local painting groups, I have been out and about around Norwich doing some 'urban sketching'. I don't yet feel ready for painting 'en plein air'.

The 1st July this year was a lovely sunny day in an amazing oasis of calm and beauty. We went out to the Bishop Palace Gardens in Norwich. I concentrated on drawing Bishop Salmon's Porch, a last remaining portion of a mediaeval stone and flint-rubble-built ruin.

My second drawing took in some more of the surroundings...

Personally, I like the second drawing best but the feedback from the others was interesting. They preferred the care taken over the accuracy in the first drawing. The first drawing is definitely more about the building where the second is more about the setting and less care was taken over the details.


I have not had the time or opportunity to join them once again until this week. After meeting at a centrally placed coffee shop, the decision was made to go to Upper St. Giles. This is a small mediaeval street near a region of Norwich know as 'The Lanes', leading to one of the largest churches in Norwich. St. Giles Church, has the second tallest tower for a church in Norwich.

Again I have made two drawings. Each took about 30 minutes. I do feel out of practice and I would prefer the confidence to be more accurate and less 'sketchy' (scribbly) with my drawings. However, I am pleased with the results. The Church is in fact, my second drawing.

The first drawing of the morning was this one, below, of a street called 'Cow Hill', viewed from the church yard. I was looking for examples of 'vernacular architecture', that is architecture built to a local tradition and of local materials but not necessarily to a set design...

What I noticed here, what caught my attetion, was the repeated pitched roofs, rather like dormer windows. What was intriguing perhaps does not come through in the drawing so clearly. The first three, from the right-hand-side are very regularly placed, as if recently built or renovated.

However, the first three pitches, from the left-hand-side, are somewhat irregularly spaced. The windows are even less evenly spaced, even the sills are not all level with each other. I wondered if this was a late-mediaeval/early-modern timber framed building which has perhaps been extended with the new-build designed to blend in.