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SKETCHING 6 SKETCHING & PAINTINGGUIDE APRIL 2020 www.painters-online.co.uk Simple landscapes T he most beautiful natural landscapes are often amongst the simplest. I love to work on such scenes with simple graphite and oil-based pencils, as can be seen on this page. My main goal is to capture the drawing as accurately as I can, but I also aim to produce a picture of good tonal power. That way, if I decide to do a painting from any of the sketches, it is easy to do so. When using the pencil in my landscapes I see the tip of the pencil as a brush, and I use it almost side-on to the paper to produce flat strokes. These marks are great for quickly and effectively capturing the sweeping mass of mountains of the foliage of a mass of trees. ▲ Before starting this sketch, I used sandpaper to roughen the paper in a Stillman & Birn sketchbook – the paper in these is very heavy and can take a battering. I made sure it was really coarse then smudged powdered graphite into the surface with tissue to get an overall dark and middle tone. This is a version of the ghosting technique that uses dry charcoal dust, rather than mixing it with water beforehand. After the tones were settled, I began drawing in oil-based pencil and graphite. The final phase involved me taking out highlights with an electric eraser to complete the dramatic landscape. ▲ This whole sketch, of Ilfracombe in the morning light, was done with my most trusted medium, graphite. I used very dark 6B and 8B sticks for the major shapes, sketching them in with broad strokes. I then drew in lines to get more details, before using an electric eraser to create highlights by removing some of the graphite. by Adebanji Alade ▲ This was sketched down rice mill way in Abakaliki. This sketch is so nostalgic because it reminds me of the great times I spent walking down this road just loving the trees, dusty roads, and the people walking back and forth, selling their goods or walking to the market. I sat on the side of the road and sketched in graphite; I used various strengths of line to depict the overall drawing and then I used broad strokes for the foliage.