Sophie Ashdown

I have been thinking about how I want this course to stretch my horizons, challenge my capabilities, and take me out of my comfort zone, in the hopes that I’ll find the direction and “niche” that I want to aim for in my practice.

So this first week I decided to challenge myself radically. Was it a good idea? I’m not entirely sure!

Normally I paint quite large abstract pieces with acrylics on canvas, creating patterns and applying paint in my own unique ways. Recently my paintings have mostly been in blues and greens. So what would be the opposite of that?

Abstract <> figurative

Large <> small

Colourful <> monochrome

Painting <> drawing

Paintbrush <> pen

Comfortable <> challenging

What could encompass all of these conflicts? How about an ink drawing on paper of a cottage in Cornwall? I was lucky to spend a long weekend at a friend’s lovely cottage in Portloe, Cornwall in September and have been wanting to find a way to thank the kind person who let us stay there. So it seemed like fate was providing me with the challenge that I needed. I could do an ink drawing of the cottage as a thank you gift.

I am not naturally talented at drawing where I can just whip up a likeness with my pencil without much effort. For me I get WAY too involved in the detail and get frustrated when I can’t capture the subject accurately.

I set about the task with the best of intentions. I drew it out in pencil first, and decided that I was not going to use a ruler so that all lines are completely hand-drawn. This worked for the most part although some of the lines were admittedly wonky. I spent about 2-3 hours drawing, erasing, re-drawing, re-erasing, etc etc. I also realised that I had made the house too big to fit the chimney in properly so I ended up making the chimney a lot shorter to fit it in! I also used some artistic license where needed.

I found the process mesmerising and excruciating in equal parts. Where the lines and details were obvious and made sense, I really enjoyed it, but some areas like the chimney and the roofline were frustrating because I couldn’t get the lines exactly right and I spent ages doing areas that should not have taken very long.

Eventually I got to a point where I was happy enough to commit to going over it with a fine ink pen.

On the recommendation of another artist, the pen I used was the Mitsubishi uniball eye micro in black, which I found worked very well. The line was fine, the ink was consistent and it dried very quickly. Once it was dry there was no smudging – fantastic.

Over the next 2-3 hours I started going over the pencil lines with the ink pen, which was working well. The lines were not perfectly straight (at all!) but it was starting to look like the cottage. Unsurprisingly I enjoyed starting to draw in the stonework because it made such a great (if unpredictable) pattern, so this felt familiar and pleasurable to work on.

Then… I made the fatal mistake of not waiting for a few seconds for the ink to dry in an area right in the middle of the picture, at the top of the door and… I smudged it. Badly. There was no fixing it or covering it up. AARGH!!

I stared at that smudged picture for a looong time. What could I do? I actually googled how to remove ink from the paper so I tried rubbing alcohol, and then acetone, but nothing worked and it probably made it look worse. Do I paint white around it? But the white of the paint and the white of the paper were not a perfect match and it was too obvious.

There was no other option but to start again. BUT in a weird way I was slightly happy about this because I wasn’t really happy with the outcome of the first one, I thought it looked amateurish (am I an amateur at drawing though?) and as it was going to be a gift I wanted the piece to be something that the recipient might be proud to put on their wall.

So I started again. But this time, I used a ruler for the first pencil drawing and was much happier with the result. I reconfigured the placement of the cottage on the paper so I could fit the chimney in. I made better decisions about how to do the brickwork around the windows, and how to place the stonework pieces.

Once the pencil drawing was done, I was MUCH happier with the result. When I moved to using the ink pen, I decided that I still wouldn’t use a ruler, but I could follow the ruled pencil lines much better so the result is straighter but every line is still hand drawn without the ruler. Why is this important to me? I think I want to be sure that the piece looks like a drawing, not an architectural diagram. My dad is a retired architect and he taught me a lot about perspective, so when I was growing up I would often do detailed drawings where almost every line used a ruler. I still like that effect but it wasn’t what I wanted for this piece.

An unexpected benefit of doing the drawing a second time is that I have been able to use the original version to test out certain areas before committing it to the new version. For example I was undecided about whether to shade in the stonework or not, and if yes then how to do it. So I used the first version to test some different methods. I was also able to test how I would do the stone wall and the plants. I have found it very useful in the process.

Here is the photo I used as reference. I had to play with the perspectives to make it look like the viewer is looking straight on to the cottage, even though the photo was taken from the road below:

Here is the first version, complete with the smudge (!) and the parts I’ve used for testing:

And here is the second version which is not finished yet and admittedly has a few mistakes (like the lanterns being misaligned – doh):

There is still a fair bit to do to finish the second drawing. I will lightly shade in the stonework, finish the roof, the front door needs more work, and there are various details to get right. Not least of which is the cottage name sign, which I’m dreading in case I get that wrong! I will update the blog once I have completed the final version of this ink drawing.

And I will be VERY careful not to smudge it!