Seasearcher fishing trip - no bites but 2 sketches

10 rods at the ready...

This morning I went out hunter-gathering. At least that was the idea. Fiona I think was feeling sorry for my me and my woeful record when it comes to catching a decent fish for the table when I go out beach fishing and had bought me a couple of sea-fishing trips for my birthday. This morning I was to spend one on the chartered fishing boat, Seasearcher, out of the Royal Port of Ramsgate which is about 13 miles east of where I live. As you can see from the sketch, the weather was rather (Paynes) grey and I was glad I'd packed the waterproofs. We were out from 9am until noon and it being midsummer my thoughts were on a lovely silver bass or three. Perhaps a string of mackerel. At worst a common dogfish, (everyone catches them, some catch so many they consider them a nuisance). Well, three hours later, the ten of us fishing caught a grand total between us of... nowt. Still, I did come back with a couple of sketches, so it wasn't entirely fruitless. 4B pencil and watercolour on rough 300gsm paper.

Squid (calamari) and herring to tempt those huge silver bass...

Well, I should have smelt something fishy when I discovered the boat was called Seasearcher and not Seacatcher. But to be a fisherman, you need to be an optimist and there's always next time... Permanent Pentel pen and watercolour wash on 300gsm watercolour paper.

SOLD: Sheppey Storm

© Peter Gander • SOLD

Thank you to Kathryn of West Malling for purchasing 'Sheppey Storm' yesterday :)

'I love Whitstable' 1st colour study

The complete study shows how crude the laying down of paint is, but hte important thing is establishing where those colours are. It would take  a braver (or more intuitive) artist to work without a study - but this works for me! Note that there are now 4 seperate colour swatches on the right, (if we count the gradation as one). The other great thing about applying colour by brush at this stage is that you will get more natural effects when not simply covering a flat area, see an example of this in the centre of the oysters, where the colour adds modelling and plumpness to the shape of the oyster's fleshy centre. That form would have been quite hard to have 'guessed' when cutting blind with a lino blade! Next stage is doing a tighter layout in pencil on tracing paper. The lettering for instance, needs a bit of crafting, although I always strive to show a hand-drawn and hand-cut font, as it lends a special quality to the piece you simply can't achieve with a 'proper', hard-edged, computer-set typeface.

'I love Whitstable' with colour in-progress

Although it may look half-decent here, the colour is just being put down loosely as a guide. The thin bleedproof layout paper, whilst perfect for tracing and pan drawing, is obviously poor in accepting watercolour, which just sits on the surface, but I am not concerned about finish as such with a quick study. When it comes to lino prints, I am a big fan of keeping it simple and you will note that I have made small 'swatches' of colour to the right of the drawing in order to keep note of how many colours, or lino/relief blocks that I'll need to cater for. Having said that, the beach portion will be a colour graduation on the printing roller itself, going from a sandy tone to a light cream at the base, which is effectively a single colour as the blend is done in one go.

'I love Whitstable' black rough drawing

This is the black-only rough on layout paper awaiting some colour washes.

Following on from my indecisiveness about the other contenders for the Whitstable print, I opted for what I now call 'I love Whitstable', featuring a bottle of tabasco sauce to represent an 'I' and a pair of overlapping oysters rpresenting the 'love' heart. Keen to water no further time, you can see that this shot is taken on the train home, where I produced a quick layout which I then traced through in permanent black pen onto bleedproof paper. Thus I could be ready to do a quick colour study over the top in watercolour to check how my seperate lino 'plates' need to be organised.

'The Greta' Thames sailing barge

© Peter Gander • SOLD

Recently on the subject of Whitstable's Oyster Festival, The Greta is a common sight in the summer around Whitstable too. A vintage Thames sailing barge, it is used today to take people on trips around the Thames estuary, for example over to the wind farms and I believe she is usually docked at Faversham, west of Whitstable. The 'bishop's finger' symbol on the mainsail (derived from a shepherd's crook) is a logo belonging to her sponsor, Shepherd Neame Brewery, Britain's oldest brewery, also based in Faversham. Watercolour on 300gsm Whatman watercolour paper (SOLD).

Sleeping woman on train

Whilst I decide which Whitstable print design to opt for, I had a break and sketched this fellow passenger on the homeward journey on the train last night. She woke and left before I could finish, but that's live sketching for you. Black Bic biro on parchment sketchpad.

From sketch to print: 'I love Whitstable'

Initial scamp (thumbnail sketch) for '6 Whitstable Oysters' print

Whilst fighting for a decent design solution for the previous post 'Whitstable Windfarm' and not getting very far, I turned my attentions to a new idea altogether to prevent me getting stale with it. Thus, I have sketched out this arrangement of 6 Whitstable Oysters. Whitstable, where I used to live and is about 7 miles from my home in Herne Bay, is renowned for its oysters (see my 'Wheeler's Oyster Bar' painting too). The town has just held its annual 'Whitstable Oyster Festival' too, where the local bishop blesses the first haul of the molluscs which spells the start of the festival, a procession through town and much more. I am a fan of oysters myself and at the harbour's Whitstable Fish Market (see again, my 'Whitstable Fish Market Figure' linocut in a previous post), I'd recommend 6 oysters with a squeeze of lemon and a healthy dash of McIlhenny’s Tabasco Sauce, seen in the design above. Being six oysters, I thought a graphic dice/domino-style arrangement of the oysters around the edge might work nicely. The 1st designs portray the molluscs as part of an 'I love'.. heart symbol, especially apt as the oyster is beleived to have aphrodisiac qualities! But I will pursue the tabasco & oysters version as that one really grabs me right now. The other design I will revisit later. Blue Bic biro on sketchpad. All images & text, copyright © Peter Gander

'Whitstable Wind Farm' from sketch to print: first sketches

Initial scamps (thumbnail sketches) of my Windfarm print

I first tried a square format in my sketchpad on my train journey to work today. In the spirit of the golden age of travel posters and with my graphic designer hat on, I was interested to see how the sails might join up to make the letter 'W' and assumed a square format would help with the geometric layout. Bearing in mind that this will be  a print and not  apainting, I was keen to keep it fairly simple. As you can see from the left-hand page, however, the face-on perspective wasn't yielding many good results. It's not until I tried a new perspective, literally, that things started to look sufficiently dynamic. As per the final scamp, top right. My dilemma now is that to the uninitiated, the sails of the turbine may not register as such as they are cropped down. However, I will explore it further. Blue Bic biro on sketchpad.

'Whitstable Wind Farm' from sketch to print: background

Following in the spirit of my 'Winderful Whitstable' posters & postcards of the past which have been very popular, I am looking at a new slant on the title, but this time using the Kentish Flats Windfarm, off Whitsable's coast, as inspiration for a new linocut, or possibly block print. The windfarm, built in 2005, is 10km from the shore (just visible on the horizon in my pic) and consists of 30 wind turbines, each 140 metres (459ft) high, taking up around 10 square km in total. The rotors are 90 metres in diameter and the turbines were installed by a specialist ship which had immersible legs which stood in the 5 metre deep water whilst the monopiles for the shafts were driven into the sand and clay seabed. The total average annual output from the farm is circa 280 million kWh. Windfarm pictures copyright and courtesy of Elsam: kentishflats.co.uk