Tag Archives: art

When I was at architecture school, (long long ago, and far away) we went on yearly jaunts called ‘sketching school’. Although they never actually taught us anything, we all went off to some town where we spent 10 days walking around and sketching in watercolours. It was always watercolours, which are of course the hardest bloody media of all to master, but this was part of the cunning plan to make us insane. Despite the necessity to produce a number of sketches on which we would be marked, we all managed to spend a lot of time just hanging out and having a good time. Since we are planning a trip back to Ontario for a week in June, where my wife will be busy visiting her family, I decided to resurrect the idea of sketching school. I will be wandering the town sketching while she sits around yakking. So I got myself a sketchbook and found, deep inside a box of art supplies, an old paint box that I had given my mother. It’s a tiny thing, the Windsor Newton pocket sketchbox, with 12 colours, which she probably never opened. With this and a new fangled water-brush, I have begun to practice for sketching school again. The brush is a Japanese invention, and has water in the handle. Thus one can do a watercolour sketch at any time or location without the need for a cup of water. Here is my first test sketch.