In #Sketchaday11  I attempted a watercolour on the spot but an encroaching storm interrupted the process almost as soon as I had started. This is how far I got:

It’s a view of Lake Revelstoke, the reservoir above Revelstoke, from Eagle Knoll. On the morning after I painted this, I attempted to finish the picture using some photos I’d taken. Yes, I have been doing all my drawings on the spot so far, but at some stage I will be taking these notes and making more drawings, paintings or prints from them, using photos as well.I did a practice run in  #Sketchaday9 and it wasn’t very successful. The sketch from memory in Sketchaday6 worked better, as I was working directly from my own previous sketch. The important thing is to try to retain the freshness of the on the spot sketches, and in a way this picture works just as it is, like a Chinese painting.  I could call it ‘before the storm’. But I wanted to finish the whole scene, so I resorted to working ‘off the spot’.

Photographs always show a slightly different view from the one we see, depending on the shape of the lens or the viewpoint/angle at which the camera is being held. So I tend to take several photos, trying not to depend on one for all the information. Even the small beginnings I made to this sketch tell me a lot about what I was most interested in, what colours I was seeing, and how much detail I wanted to put in. Most importantly, I had sat and looked at the scene, instead of flashing a camera at it and walking on.

After an hour and a half, I felt I’d done quite enough. I think it reflects what I was seeing, without taking too much information from the photo and consequently killing the freshness.