Colourize Project: Blagdon Hill

More rain!.. So I'm dusting off some old sketches again and giving them the colour treatment. This one is from the hill in Blagdon. It's a patch of steep farmland surrounded by houses. The local New Plymouth station, Access Radio Taranaki, broadcasts from the top and they have great sea views from up there.

Port Taranaki

The other day I was biking around the port area, looking for something to draw. I noticed a road sign that said 'Port View Crescent'. I've never been there before but with a name like that I went up the road hoping for a good view. Not much yet so I turned off a side street and had a nice open vista over Port Taranaki. Actually, between the end of a driveway and the start of an open grassy strip there was a park bench. I'm not sure who's it was but it overlooked the port and was out of the sun and under a tree. So if someone's reading this and noticed, "Hey... that's my bench", I hope you don't mind and thanks for putting it there!

New Plymouth ANZAC Day 2017

I've been out sketching other things since it's actually been pretty dry lately, however here is my finished ANZAC Day dawn ceremony sketch. As you can see I've made most of it way darker. The areas that you had seen in my previous progress pic are sort of visual notes reminding me that these are the really dark areas. This allows me to do a reasonably detailed sketch of something that is only there for a short period of time. This is my third ANZAC sketch, three years in a row. I didn't plan on coming out to do another one this year, but my sketch from last year was chosen to be in an art show in New Plymouth (running from June to November). This sort of motivated me to try it again. I don't think I will do a fourth any year soon but I'm happy with three; they look good together.

Progress Pic: ANZAC 2017

Here's a sketch that I did at the Taranaki dawn service on ANZAC Day in New Plymouth. For those that aren't from down under, this is a very early morning Remembrance Day. (ANZAC stands for Australia & New Zealand Army Corps.) So it's very dark but there are also bright spotlights. It's hard to see the dark bits while blinded by bright lights. Still, I found a good view that didn't have a spotlight facing me, but still had enough light to see my page. I also had to keep in mind that when the people get there they might be casting a shadow on my book. In the end, I just started and hoped for the best!
At that time, most of the people weren't there yet. I started to draw the monument, trees and black foreground tree shapes. I keep doing that until the people show up and settle in the place that they will be. I have about 20 minutes the draw as much people as possible. By the time that's over, the suns coming up and everything looks quite a bit different. What you see here is about an hour of drawing. The people in the foreground will have very dark shadows, with highlights around the edges of each on, due to the spotlights. It's mostly like you see but darker. The monument the the mid ground people will also be darker, remembering that the main light is coming from the right. The trees could also barely be seen so I'll build up quite a bit of ink. Although they are white as you see now, they will blend into the sky. This seemed like something I could do later so I left it at the time.
That was about a week ago now and I've been chipping away at it a little at a time. I always think that I am taking notes, as in I draw enough of each part so that I remember what each part looked like. My next post will be the finished one and you can see how it turned out.