Summer 2016 b

Wild Sketching with Sarah Humby
I love sketching
outside, and I do it
often, come rain or
shine.
I used to paint mainly from photographs
and it wasn’t until I visited
a wonderful exhibition at The Fine
Foundation Gallery at Durlston Castle
by Tony Kerins; a great advocate of
sketching, that I became inspired to
start drawing while out and about and
learned that a sketch is vastly more
useful as a reference tool for studio
work.
How I work has changed a great deal
since I got into the wild sketching habit.
It has become a major part of my
art practice. Work made and developed
from sketching in the field is invested
with my own personality from
the very get go.
You can focus on the things that attract
you and which you want to explore
later and develop into new work. You
learn how to problem solve and record
things quickly which is a great way of
23
loosening up and allowing your creativity
to ‘flow’. Soon you begin to develop your
own personal ‘language’ when recording
and documenting the world around you. I
regularly sketch with a friend and it’s always
interesting to compare the different
ways we depict the same views.
Emotional response David Hockney calls
it.
The very act of sketching requires you to
tune in and properly look at the subject
and make personal decisions about what
you want to say about it. And that process
is the starting point from which you can
later translate and develop finished work.
However beautiful a photograph may be
it will never do that work for you.
Sketching grounds you firmly in the environment
and requires you to engage with
it. You need to be prepared sometimes to
battle with the elements. Wind and rain
should be no match for the well prepared
sketcher. Tony Kerrins even sketches in
darkness. Some of the worst weather creates
some of the most fantastic opportunities
for drawing and recording in whatever
medium you like. You will need
sunglasses and sunblock sometimes but
you will also need a woolly hat, gloves
and a good set of waterproofs.
On a recent trip to the ridge above
Durlston Lighthouse I needed all of
the above in the space of three hours!
Only the threat of lightning strike
made me consider moving to lower
ground. I call it wild sketching for
good reason.
It’s useful to have a bag dedicated to
your sketching trips with everything
in that you need. Remember it’s going
to be windy so take lots of clips!
Watercolour is the perfect sketching
medium in a lot of ways. It is so transportable
and convenient and obviously
perfect for recording even the most
subtle of colours (and boy don’t the
colours change quickly when you are
out in the real world!) But you can use
whatever you find easiest to document
the scene. I use pastels because they
are direct and dynamic (and, truth be
told, because I am not very confident
with watercolour).
So go to it. Get out into the
big wide Dorset world; it’s
one of the most inspirational
counties in the UK
for the intrepid artist and
it’s all just waiting to be
sketched!
joyce
ringrose
sarah
humby
coastal
colours