Speed sketch

The need to do something simple and quickly

Boat on the marshes 2015

After the long and relatively complex painting of the Man at the Helm I felt the need to do something that required little planning and preparation and that could be done in one short session. This charcoal sketch of the marshes in the USA was a nice exercise that I did in about 20 minutes. I had thought of painting it, and I may decide to later, but it's a dark and very muted scene so charcoal was fine.

The sky is messy because I didn't use a level and flat card under the paper and I didn't want to spend long correcting it. If I was doing this as a completed and correct drawing I would've given the sky a much darker and smoother finish and the reeds would've been given much more detail too.

The main thing is it was fun, it forced me to look at tonal range in particular and I had to make decisions quickly without thinking too much.