Looking back: My favourite Urban Sketches from 2023 (Part 2 of 2)

The year I dived into landscapes and colour

Looking through my sketchbooks from the past year is always a weird feeling. The first couple of months of the year feels so far away, but the sketches bring back such vivid memories, that it feels like it happened just yesterday. Yet it is good to look back at the year, to see how far one has come. This has been a good sketching year for me. It is the year that I started to feel really comfortable with sketching on location; the first year that I truly felt that the odds were in my favour when starting a new sketch. Maybe it came along with a mind shift in the way I approached sketching in general, or maybe it was just that I sketched so frequently that muscle memory started to work in my favour.

As I went through the sketches from this past year, I noticed four categories or themes emerging:

1. Playing with collage

2. Experimenting with sketching on top of under-paintings

3. Emerging landscapes

4. Intensifying the way I see and play with colour

In part one of this series I looked at the first two, and in this newsletter I will look at the latter two.

You can read part one of this short series here.

Emerging landscapes

I don’t set new years resolutions, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t set any goals for the year. These goals can probably be referred to as “soft” resolutions. These are usually things that I am curious about at that stage, things that I would like to get better at or that I am frustrated with when I try to do it. The resolution would quietly percolate in my head, while I figured out what the best way would be to tackle the challenge. No due date is set - it is a “soft” resolution after all - but I rather set a practical plan that will help me to pursue it.

During our visit to Austria about a year and a half ago, I experienced so much frustration when I tried to draw the landscape. I love mountains, but I struggled to capture them in my sketchbook. Once we came back I was determined to get better at drawing landscapes. I would look at the work of someone like Maru Godas, and be so captivated by how she could seemingly effortlessly switch between drawing busy city scenes and wide open landscapes. So I bought a book on painting landscapes and watched way too many episodes of Landscape Artist of the Year, but most importantly, I dared to try again, not letting my previous frustrations halt me.

I kept on hearing Hockney’s voice in my head about the need to build a vocabulary of the subject that you want to draw. So when we went to the Ardennen in February, I decided to take the pressure off and focus on just that - building my vocabulary for drawing landscapes. I had a bit of a false start when I tried to immediately also capture the colours, so I decided to regroup and just start with mark making, tonal value and composition.

I did this sketch at dusk on our second last day in the Ardennen. Where I had at the beginning of the trip still struggled with the wide open spaces and the abundance of different textures, I now felt more comfortable drawing simple landscapes.

I made a short video where I go through all the sketches of that trip which you can watch here.

Intensifying the way I see and play with colour

As the year progressed, I felt the need to sketch outside in the dunes and forest more and more. I started off by taking my sketchbook along whenever we went on a hike, making a quick stop to sketch when the opportunity presented itself. Later in the year I started to deliberately go on hikes, just so I could sketch. Sometimes doing it up to three times a week. I averaged up to 30km per week at some point.

During one of our hikes I stopped to do this sketch while the kids played a bit in the forest. This sketch ended up being the start of a project that I am currently working on - building a collection of sketches that I did in and of the Zuid-Kennemerland National Park during hikes and bike rides.

I also started to observe and experience the colours around me more intensely. This probably came from all the hours I spent hiking and sketching in the National Park. I started to notice all the subtle hues in the landscape. The greens and purples in the bark of the trees. The oranges in the undergrowth and the yellows and beiges in the grass. A whole world opened up for me, and I can see this influencing my art for many years to come.

I did this sketch during a bike ride at the end of spring, when the land was dry and the grasses were in full bloom.

Currently I am turning some of those sketches into bigger acrylic paintings on canvas, and I am loving every moment of it. Here’s a little sneak-peek of one of the paintings in this series.

With this last newsletter for this year, I would like to wish you a merry Christmas and a good 2024, filled with many taken opportunities to sketch. I am looking forward to what next year has in store for my sketchbook and this newsletter. I already have many ideas percolating in my head and notebook. I hope that you have been enjoying this journey, and that I have successfully tempted you into picking up and using a sketchbook.

May your sketchbooks be filled with good memories.

Nino