Westgate Field Notes - Review of the 1st 100 drawings.
So today I drew my 100th sketch / drawing / painting for my Westgate Field Notes series. It felt like a good point to take stock, review what I’d done and think about going forwards.
So this all started back on 14th June 2024 when I posted my first sketch of the series. Its taken me 69 days to hit the 100 mark which isn’t too bad I reckon. 1.45 drawings a day. And that was part of what this was about. I wanted to make sure I drew everyday. Having a particular series to work on helped that somehow rather than jumping from subject to subject. I’ve been doing other drawings too and I’ll cover them ina future sketchbook post.
I put all the drawings into a folder and reviewed them in Lightroom. Each one I liked, got one star. I then took all the one stars and whittled them down to two stars and so on until I got to a solitary 5 star sketch.
1 star
Of the initial 100, the first edit left with me 50 drawings. They are a mixture of digital, watercolour only, watercolour and ink, watercolour pencil, polychromos colour pencil and collage so a really representational cross section of all the work I made. At first glance, I think they all kind of hang together cohesively too which, given the different mediums I have used, is gratifying and somewhat unexpected. Definitely a mix of more muted and more saturated work, think I am more drawn in the review to the higher saturation.
2 stars
Time to cull again. Same proces. Take the 50 1 star drawings and make a tighter edit.
50 now becomes 32 and lots of the less saturated didn’t make the cut. Again still a nice mix although down to digital (4), watercolour and ink, watercolour only, watercolour pencil and polochromos pencils. Not sure how helpful this analysis is to be honest as the weighting will be skewed as did so much less digital, polychromos and watercolour pencil work.
Something I am noticing is a tendency in my sketches to be more about buildings, structures and objects rather than people. That may be more to do with my confidence levels at this point rather than deliberate choices to exclude them.
3 Stars
Getting harder now as it becomes more challenging to separate the work I have a connection with and the work I am happiest with. To be honest, not sure what they will be ever totally separated so this is a very subjective edit. Be interesting to do it again on a different day and see if produced a different selection. All the way through I have been experimenting and some have been less successful than others and some have thrown up surprises. Choices of mediums have been determined by lots of things but mostly I have just tried to work with what I have to hand. So the decision to use colour pencil was down to having some Bristol Vellum paper that wasn’t so well suited to wet medium.
We’re down to 19 now and what I find interesting is that it’s a mix of work from across the 69 days. I thought that the more recent work would dominate as I progressed but its not the case at all. Some of these in fact are not technically brilliant at all but there is a quality to them that means they make the cut.
4 stars
Getting harder to remove some now but down to top 10 (well 12, but you get the gist). The mix is still the same though - some with and without linework, some digi and some on paper. All sit well together though in context of field notes of and about Westgate-on-Sea.
5 star
Take a box Sunglasses on a tennis court. Lots wrong, technically, with this but equally lots I am absolutely delighted with. Saturation and composition being the main two and allowing the white space to play it’s part is key but I think it’s the shadows on the sunglasses that just gives this one sketch the edge over all the others.
But more important for me in this process of review is realised that I hadn’t started making 1 - 2 drawings a day over the last two months or so, none of these would have existed and for that I am grateful, happy and proud.
