All Saints’ Church, Cambridge

But I’m getting of myself.  I picked out this scene (which, if you haven’t guessed is a view from within Christ’s College) for two reasons.  First, because I thought the toothiness of the paper would give a good hazy effect to the church and, second, because I thought those trees would be a great test for my coloured pencil jamming.

The initial drawing wasn’t a great test of my skills so, for the first time in ages, I didn’t use a grid or even a ruler, just drawing by hand in light grey.  To mark out the initial shapes, I went for mauve in the sky and reds and browns for the trees and grass.  I left the church as a white shape.

And then I filled the paper with colour.  As usual I kept moving from shape to shape rather than working from back to front I tend to do with watercolour.  For the sky, I added on all sorts of different blues in layers, different blues in different places, then added a unifying layer of sky blue on top.  Then I dabbed out some white clouds with a putty eraser and then burnished over it all in white.

For the grass I followed a similar technique.  Multiple layers with variegated colours but nor really jamming.  So I kept going over the grass with greens, blues, yellows and the odd bit of brown in different places.  Obviously I added those shadows too, using caput mortum violet and dark sepia but also some other violets.  Maybe blues and reds too.  I started with shadows at the back and in the middle, as per my source photo, but put them in as horizontal shapes pointing to the left rather than upwards and to the left.  And the position of the sun that those shadows implied would mean that there would also be shadows right down at the front.  So I added these and you can see where I didn’t get the colours quite right: the nearest shadows are more brown and less purple.  Anyway, the grass and shadows were all smoothed out with a paper stump.

There’s not much to say about the church, the bench and the back wall.  For these I generally tried to replicate the colours that I could see using multiple layers.  And not many layers for the church, which I wanted to stay really bright.  The darks in the church windows were made from layers of a blue, a red and a green.  All these shapes were smoothed out at the edge with a paper stump.

And then we get to the trees and the flower beds.  The trees were jammed, jammed, jammed.  After putting down the first layer of reds and browns (I say a layer but it was jammed, leaving lots empty space) I danced around with a layer of greens, just to get the colour in the right ballpark.  After that, I jammed in loads of levels of greens, browns, reds, blues and yellows.  Sometimes this meant using tight circles in places, sometimes it meant moving from place to place without ever sticking around.and things just kept building and building.  There’s so much texture there: I can see all those individual twigs.  During the jamming, I admit I did have one eye on values, especially lightest right where I wanted the tree pushed back and some bits of the closest tree to be darker.  And I generally concentrated the yellows (including the cadmium yellow, which was playing a blinder today) around the edges of the trees and on the tree on the left that the sun was shining on.  Whenever I added reds or browns, everything suddenly improved and the painting came to life – that’s worth remembering.  Eventually I decided that I needed to unify colours before the paper became full, so added a unifying layer, albeit in two different colours on the right where I wanted that value contrast.  The flower beds were my biggest problem today: they started off being coloured sensibly (like the church and back wall) but ended up getting jammed instead.  It didn’t help that the purple flowers in the bottom right started in the light but ended up in shadow.  And I finished by smoothing out the trees and flower beds with a paper stump.

And that was me done.

Well, that was an enjoyable few hours of jamming.  From a distance, this looks amazing, the trees and the church in particular.  The jamming definitely worked.  And the one point perspective of the scene brings the viewer’s eye to the church with its hazy edges.  It’s a shame the flower beds weren’t 100% jammed but I’m still thinking this is pretty good.  Definitely one for the shop window.