Playing with watercolour and yes, another bridge
Dear Sarah - Day 151 of our daily drawing exchange
May 31, 2025
Hi Nikki,
Where did May go?
Today was a combo of work, another birthday lunch, a baseball game (watching my grandson, not playing) and now watching YouTube videos about how to create leaves, petals and colour wheels. Mixing colours remains a mystery, as you can probably tell.
And once more it's dinner time, so off I go!
XO Sarah
Hi Sarah!
Bridge-obsessed as I am (but short of time to actually learn how to draw one), I went off in search of a bridge in my photos that I could use as reference… and, found this:
I must have photographed this when going through Dad’s studio - this was his sketchbook from when he was perhaps 12 or 13? Hard to say as nothing was dated, but it was fun to see he was capturing local bridges as I am trying to do so many decades later. Note the gas lamp in the middle… and, the not terrible perspective.
What I wound up doing for my bridge of the day was printing out a screenshot from a video of one of the pedestrian bridges that cross Cougar Creek. I rubbed soft pencil over the back and then placed the now filthy back on a fresh sketchbook page. Using a fine ballpoint pen I then traced over the key elements in the photo to transfer the pencil onto the sketchbook page.
The result is a sort of sketchy underdrawing that is at least vaguely true to the original scene.
I’m pretty sure Dad taught me this pencil transfer trick when I was a kid. No idea why it percolated to the surface this evening, but there you go. I could use this as a way to lightly sketch the bones of an image onto the page and then draw over the top, add colour, etc.
But, not tonight.
Until tomorrow,
Nikki