Turning Sketches into a Picture

Blog author Bob Prince

We went to Sharpness with TAC sketching group arranged by Shirley Whyte.

There are a multitude of subjects to choose from.

The first sketch I sat and did was this scene.

It’s ridiculously complicated to look at. I got cold and came to a standstill, but Shirley was still sketching so I did another quick sketch from another part of the scene. My eye was in, and it only took about five minutes.

Because I was in roughly the same position the back end of one boat appeared in the first sketch and the front in the next, so I thought about compiling both pictures together. I have a scanner and a computer programme called Affinity Photo which would enable me to do this. When scanning sketches, I set the scanner to Black and White which gives me a sharp pen line and cuts out grey tones.

Both pictures are at the same scale having been drawn on an A5 page of my sketch pad, so I need to get the relative scales correct which gives something like this.

I have set the page size to A3 to do this composition so the final result will bear looking at in greater detail. The capstan in the centre is at the correct scale relative to where I was sitting when doing the right-hand side sketch although you will notice I had only drawn less than half of it if you look back at my original sketch. So, first I copied that bit and flipped it over to get the other half. Now of course you can see that it dominates too much of the centre of the picture, so I decided to resize it which means I then needed to recreate what was behind it from my new point of view. I had taken two reference pictures on my phone and therefore I could look back at that detail

This is the superstructure of the boat behind the capstan. The line is finer than it appears in the final picture, so I needed to increase its thickness and introduce a bit of texture.

This is the final result with the smaller capstan and the orange boat behind it. You will note I have also added something of the work going on in the dry dock which I couldn’t see from my original sitting position. The perspective all gets a bit forced because these details came from a photo I took from an entirely different position. Much of the colour is picked directly from the reference photos. It was a grey old day. Let’s brighten it up a little! Because we can…