Читать книгу Collins 30-Minute Painting - Alwyn Crawshaw - Страница 8
Оглавление▲ Morston Quay, Norfolk
20 x 28 cm (8 x 11 in)
I painted this on location, using the minimum equipment needed for sketching outdoors.
For a beginner, going into an art materials shop must be very confusing. There are hundreds of brushes, many different papers and a bewildering choice of sketchbooks, pencils and paints, all invitingly displayed.
However, help is here: on the next two pages I will show you the basic simple materials you should buy. You don’t need a large range of equipment for sketching, and for working on location you certainly won’t want to carry a lot with you. Keep things simple with your materials at first and get used to them – if you want to try different ones, experience will guide you as you progress.
Pencils
▲ A basic pencil sketching kit: 2B, 3B and 6B pencils, a putty eraser and sketchpads.
Pencils are available in a range of grades. The most familiar one, which you will find in any stationery shop, is HB. The letter ‘H’ stands for hard lead, and the range covers 2H, 3H, 4H, 5H and 6H. The hardest pencil is the 6H. On the other side of HB are the ‘B’ (soft lead) grades – 2B, 3B, 4B, 5B, 6B. The softest pencil is the 6B.
I use a 2B pencil for most of my sketching, but there are occasions when I turn to a 3B or a 6B. These are the three pencils you need for the exercises in this book. You will also require a putty eraser for rubbing out your pencil marks. It is impossible to get everything correct the first time, so an eraser is as important to you as your pencil.
Paper
Unless otherwise specified, all the sketches in this book are on cartridge drawing paper; the remainder are on Bockingford Not watercolour paper. Both can be bought in pads. There are a number of other watercolour papers available, in different weights and surfaces. When I am working outdoors, most of my sketching is done in a Daler-Rowney A4 or A3 cartridge sketchbook.
QUICK TIP
To stop your sketchpad pages flapping when you are working outdoors, just slip an elastic band round the outer edge of the pad.
Watercolours
▲ A basic watercolour sketching kit: a water jar, a paintbox, three brushes, a 2B pencil, a putty eraser and sketchpads.
Watercolours come in pans or tubes. I recommend that you don’t use tubes, as you can control the amount of paint you put on your brush much more easily from a pan, and a paintbox of pans is much more convenient for sketching outdoors. There are two qualities of paint: students’ and artists’. I use artists’ quality, but Daler-Rowney Students’ Aquafine are very good and less expensive. The seven colours I use are discussed here.
Brushes
The best watercolour brushes are manufactured from sable hair, and they are the most expensive that you can buy. However, there are excellent synthetic brushes on the market that cost much less than sable, and they are used by many professional artists (Daler-Rowney Dalon is one example). I use a No. 10 round brush as my big brush, a No. 6 round as my small brush and a Daler-Rowney Dalon D99 Rigger No. 2 for thin lines. The higher the number, the larger the brush.
