Summer at Sissinghurst

At the end of July I visited the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle - one of the most noted gardens for flowers in England. After all the rain we've had this summer, the Cottage Garden and the White Garden were both quite spectacular.

One of the world's most celebrated gardens, the creation of Vita Sackville-West and her husband Sir Harold Nicolson. Developed around the surviving parts of an Elizabethan mansion. A series of small, enclosed compartments, intimate in scale and romantic in atmosphere, provide outstanding design and colour through the seasons. (National Trust)

For those who have not visited before - a couple of warnings.

• The gardens are both intimate and 'full on' and swamp you with images.
  
• It can be very difficult if not impossible to find somewhere to sit when the gardens are open to the public.

The combination of scale and the number of visitors (it has to have timed entrance arrangements) and the total lack of scope for bringing in a chair and/or easel means that it is far from easy to either create a good composition or get much work done while the garden is open to the public.

However there is a solution!

I've now got the the phone number to contact the Sissinghurst Office so that I can arrange to go back on one of the days they are not open to the public. Apparently, on Wednesdays, they are now taking bookings for up to six artists to draw/paint the gardens. You can also use their e-mail address which is on the National Trust website.

Sweet Peas and Red Hot Pokers, Cottage Garden, Sissinghurst
11" x 8", pen and ink and coloured pencil in Daler Rowney sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I've included two very quick sketches. I was incredibly fortunate and managed to 'bag' "Harold Nicholson's chair" which sits outside the door to the cottage in the Cottage Garden for the first one.

The second sketch was done in the White Garden just before the gardens closed - which is an idyllic time to be in the gardens. The white rose over the central pergola had finished flowering but the rest of the garden was in bloom - but the best positions to draw or paint this can only be taken up when the public are absent.

The statue under the tree, White Garden, Sissinghurst
11" x 8", pen and ink and coloured pencil in Daler Rowney sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Notes:

1. This was a joint post in support of both the Flowers in Art (July 2007) and Gardens in Art (August 2007) projects on Making A Mark - both of which have associated squidoo lenses.
2. Similar content previously appeared in a slightly different format on Making A Mark in early August. I've also posted about Sissinghurst before on making A Mark and these posts will also be transferred to this blog so I can create summaries of posts by area. I've included the links to the original posts below as well as details about the garden.
   

Links

• National Trust: Sissinghurst Castle Gardens
• Wikipedia: Sissinghurst
• Making a Mark: The White Garden, Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent
• Making a Mark: Autumn at Sissinghurst
  
• Squidoo - Gardens in Art
• Squidoo - Flowers in Art
  

Great Dixter

The Oast House, Great Dixter

8" x 10", pen and sepia ink and coloured pencil in Daler Rowney sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Yesterday, we visited the house and gardens at Great Dixter in East Sussex. I've heard of it often but have never made the longish journey down to its location in the village of Northiam, seven miles northwest of Rye.

To tell the truth I found most of of the garden almost impossible to sketch for various reasons:

• there are virtually no places to sit
• the gardens are much more about a profusion and an experience than about views (the garden is compartmentalised and is simply stuffed with an amazing mixture of plants)
  
• there is no place to put a collapsible stool or seat even if one were allowed to as paths are by and large narrow and the plants are spilling over them. There might be places where one could sit - but I found it very difficult to compose views with the camera and I'm guessing the problem would be even worse if trying to sketch compounded by the virtual absence of seats.

Do take a look at the website for more details about the layout, design and conponents of the gardens. (When I've got the photos sorted I'll come back and add some into this post)

Finally I sat on the stone ledge seats in the Sunk Garden - next to the lily pond - and sketched the oast house roofs. We'd been having some rather threatening rain clouds and very fortunately we got that wonderful light you sometimes get when sun combines with rain clouds and hence had citric acid lemon trees against purpley blue skies right next to a rich terracotta tiled roof oft he oast house. I'm afraid I wasn't much interested in drawing much of the garden having seen those colours!

We then visited the house and admired the hammerbeam roof in the Great Hall, the solar and Christopher Lloyd's collection of gardening books.

What I found fascinating was the career of Nathanial Lloyd (Christo's father) who made the money to purchase and renovate the property and develop the garden by developing a very suucessful business supplying graphic art for advertising at the turn of the twentieth century. This effectively enabled him to retire - at which point he worked with Lutyens to develop the accommodation at Great Dixter and then became something of an expert on brickwork in English houses!

We came home via Rye. I don't know quite why but each time I eat there I have a dreadful meal. Ever the optimist? You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now!

Links:

• Great Dixter - House and Gardens

Sketching plein air with coloured pencils

The Order Beds
10" x 14" on Arches Hot Press
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

This is a sketch which I started a couple of weeks ago at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew - or Kew Gardens as they popularly known and finished the next day. It's a view of the Order Beds (in the north eastern section of the garden or no 28 on the map) from the centre of that bit of the garden - looking towards the Temple of Aeolus which sits on top of the artifical mound known as Cumberland Mount.

The Order Beds were originally introduced by Sir Joseph Hooker as a living library of flowering plants for students of botany and horticulture - the plants being systematically arranged so that they could be easily located for study.This process, and the science of understanding the relationship between plants, is known as taxonomy and is the basis of all research carried out at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. A pergola covered with climbing roses covers the central path of the area, and the surrounding walls provide shelter for many plants
Kew website

My approach to sketching plein air with coloured pencils

As I'm trying to get a lot of sketches done during my Gardens in Art month on "Making A Mark", I thought that I'd say a bit about what I do when I sketch plein air using coloured pencils.

Get comfortable and used to the place

• If you're new to sketching you can sometimes find it easier and more comfortable if you are with someone else. However you do need a willing partner for your expedition, rather than somebody who is going to find your sketching a tiresome and time-consuming activity! If your partner respects your dedication to sketching and you want to spend time with him or her, then you'll need to make it easy for them to accompany you on trips - so they don't get bored either!
• First off, when we go out with the intention of me sketching, the deal is that we always have to find a bench where "he who must not be bored while I sketch" can sit in the sun. He's not keen on shade! Then we make sure he has enough reading material. On Saturday he was armed with the Financial Times, the Economist, a professional journal and a book - he's used to my sketching trips.
• I generally start with a good walk around the place on my own. Being on your own makes it a lot easier to just stand and stare! It's also amazing how just 'being there' and letting your eyes do some work before you sit down to sketch helps to get your eyes attuned to colours particular to the place. In this case the order beds were past the early summer excesses in terms of flowers and were now either empty or had just the leaves.

Use my camera selectively as a tool and for reference purposes

• I use my camera to:
• take general photographs of the place.
• try out different crops of the scene I'm thinking of sketching - using the viewfinder. It's great when the shape is the same as the camera's and not so useful if a different shape would suit better. If you think you'd like to crop down take a shot which is larger than the view you'd like to do.
• take photos at the beginning and the end and as the light changed while I was sketching and then again at the end. If you're not used to sketching pleir air you'll be amazed at how fast the light and shadows change - particularly at either end of the day.
• Very often when I do a worked up version of a sketch, I may change things. With this one the issue is whether to have a long thin version looking down the long strip of grass or whether to include all the nuances of the foliage in the landscape view. Having photos helps with the structure of compositions even if they are less than perfect at recording both colour and values.

Develop a "thumbnail sketch"

• For this view I first developed a thumbnail sketch for the design and value pattern. Except my idea of thumbnail is 8" x11"!!! I'm just more comfortable doing them big. Plus once I've got the mono version done and I'm happy with it I quite often put in key colours to remind me of what and where they are in case they disappear. I am after all sketching outside - and the sun moves as do the clouds.

"Thumbnail" sketch for The Order Beds
(8" x 11" in daler Rowney Sketchbook)
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

• I then usually lay my thumbnail sketch in my sketchbook on the ground at my feet so I can glance at it easily while sketching. This is the other good reason for doing them big because they look a lot more thumbnail sized when lying on the ground!

Consider and select colours

• Coloured pencils are really great for being able to make colour studies and provide much more accurate information than the colour you get from photos. I find that photographs taken on sunny days (as this one was) often distort both values and colour quite badly.
• When looking at and trying to work out coloursI find it helpful to:
• mentally name the colours as I look at them - giving them a name helps to make that stick in my head.
• select all the colours I expect to use and put the pencils in a separate box. Bear in mind that what I'm looking for is the colour in the colour. So it's less about looking for greens and more about looking for the red/blue/yellow in the green.
• The critical issue with this particular scene was to notice all the different sorts of greens which existed - from the intense apple green of the nasturtiums (bottom left) top the intense acid yellow of the grass where the sunlight was hitting it in the centre to the yellow ochre green gold of some of the trees in the middle background to the sea greens of some of the plantings (the overgrown sweet peas right of centre) and the black cherry/pine green of some of the trees in the background.
• I very often start with the 'other than green' colours I can see in the greens and build up from there. With coloured pencils you can lay down a colour and then glaze over the top. Optical mixing makes for much more interesting colours which I think adds depth to sketches. If you look through my sketchbooks you'll see a lot of examples.

Develop the sketch

• Using a mechanical pencil I sketched in the main structure quickly. I then start to roughly dab colour around the piece - generally starting with the darks at the junction with the lights.
• I use a hatching movement for most of it, changing the angles to suit the form. The hatching is loose so that when I hatch on top with a different colour you can see through it. My guess is most people would have a fit if they could see how imprecise I am and how much I simply scribble. It always feels a bit like sculpting where I get closer and closer to finding the real form and 'look' of a piece.
• I'm planning to try and organise it so that "must not be bored" takes a video of me while working at some point in the future. Either that or I remember where the instructions are for the remote control for my camera!

Finishing

• It's rare to get everything done while I'm out. However sketching a lot outside means that I've developed a very good visual memory of a place which usually lasts as a good quality image for about 24 hours. I then use the next 24 hours to both recall what more needs developing and also to look at the piece far more critically from an aesthetic viewpoint.
• Being away from the place means that I can now adjust for what 'feels right' as opposed to 'what actually is'. You can make a choice about sketching for accuracy or sketching for aesthetics - there is no requirement to sketch everything exactly as seen. You are an artist and artists are allowed to change things!
• On return home I did a few more things:
• I finished hatching the areas where I'd just put down enough to know the colour. Essentially this is very often a "more of the same" exercise. It almost always applies to the sky area once I've worked out any cloud edges. It often applies to big and somewhat similar masses - I've got the initial colour down and I have photos to check shapes - essentially it's very often "more of the same"
• I then worked on the relative values. This is very often something which I don't get quite right on site - usually for no other reason than that white paper in sunlight causes problems with evaulation. I find getting the sketch back indoors means I get a better sense of the extent to which I've hit the right values. My method involves always mentally telling myself where all the darkest patches are as I'm drawing and then my memory prompts a checklist when I get home. In this instance the trees at the back were very dark in patches and I needed to develop that further - which I did using complementary colours so the areas would vibrate rather than look 'dead' holes.
• Using my battery powered eraser, I then lifted out some birdie holes and lightened some areas where light coloured flowers exist and places where and grasses and tendrils had got backlighting. I then put back some of the clean light colours - the pale pinks and the lemon yellows.

While at Kew I had great fun inspecting all the vegetables in the beds developed by the horticulture students and taking photographs - only to discover when I got home that I'd inadvertently adjusted something on my camera and the photos were a lot smaller than intended. C'est la vie! But I've decided I'm definitely going to develop a series about vegetables.

Gardens in Art
In August I've been doing a project on Gardens in Art on my main blog Making A Mark in order to develop my art and artwork involving gardens. If you enjoy sketching gardens and also would like to look at different ways of looking at gardens, I've included links to the various posts below.

Notes

1. Most of this post was first published as Gardens in Art - The Order Beds at Kew Gardens in Making A Mark. This version includes some additional text.
2. All text copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Links:

• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
• Map of Kew Gardens with links to all the different parts of the garden
• The Order Beds, Kew
• My website: Travels with a Sketchbook
• Making A Mark - Gardens in Art Project (August 2007
• Gardens in Art - Scope and Resources
• Gardens in Art: A new squidoo lens
• A new Wet Canvas Forum for Floral/Botanical Art (includes reference to sketching at Sissinghurst)
• Gardens in Art: 2 bookshops and 1001 gardens
• Gardens in Art: In the gardens of Impressionism
• Gardens in Art - Resources for Artists (squidoo lens with lots of links to more information)
• Gardens in Art: The Order Beds at Kew Gardens
• Gardens in Art - Pastel paintings of gardens in Spain
• Gardens in Art - the concept and art of the garden
• Gardens in Art - Drawings and Paintings by Van Gogh
• Gardens in Art - Are you a veggie?

Sunday in the Park

Sunday in the Park
pen and sepai ink and coloured pencil in Moleskine sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

It's the Bank Holiday weekend and it's very good weather. Do you get in the car and sit in queues behind other cars heading for the countryside or coast - or do you take a walk and go to your local park? We opted for the latter on the basis I've started to feel rather better and needed to start doing a bit more walking around.

This is the world's oldest public park - Victoria Park in the East End of London. It has rather a lot of nice Victorian cast iron benches which line the edges of the main promenades. It's also a great place for people watching.

You can see other views of Victoria Park in the links below.

Links:

• Travels with a Sketchbook - Sketching Victoria Park and the Hertford Union
• Travels with a Sketchbook - Victoria Park: The Tea Pavilion
  

International Sketchcrawl - Great Comp Garden, Kent

Great Comp Garden
pen and sepia ink and coloured pencil in Moleskine sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Minded to produce another sketch for the Gardens in Art project I'm doing on Making A Mark this month, I did a quick sketch of a view of part of the garden at Great Comp in Kent which we visited yesterday. This is late afternoon on a very sunny warm day (which we've had far too few of this summer) and I rather liked the contrast with the shadows and the lighting on the lawn and in the beds of heather beds either side.

This is my contribution to yesterday's International Sketchcrawl. I've not been well just recently and walking has been difficult, so I couldn't contemplate the normal sort of activities associated with a sketchcrawl. I even had to change shoes to get round this garden!

Tip - correcting colour in photos

I took a photo of the pen and ink sketch so you could see how I sketch in pen and ink and how much I do before I started adding coloured pencil.

However, I was sat in a very shady spot and, on the left above, is what my photo came out looking like. On the right is what it looked like after I'd wrestled with it in Photoshop. (Click on either/both to see larger versions).

To lose the blue colour cast I didn't use the colour cast function. Instead I used the Levels function to adjust each of the Red, Green and Blue settings individually (basically pulling in the ends - whatever that's called) and then I upped the brightness and contrast. It took a few goes but suddenly it came together. I'm very much of the opinion that it's well worthwhile getting to grips with the Levels function and Lighting generally in PS. Ever since I've started focusing on using Levels, I've found that I've got much better results with removing colour casts and getting much more natural colour from photos - although stay away from Auto Levels as it produces very odd results.

Apologies

Apologies to regular readers - I've been neglecting this blog in the last month and need to set to and do quite a few 'backlog' posts as a catch up.

Links:

• Great Comp Garden, Comp Lane, Platt, Kent TN15 8QS
• International Sketchcrawl