Using creative visualisation: Sketching boats in Northumberland
Ambition and anticipation
Drawing boats has long been a mini ambition of mine. Wanting to capture their distinctive shapes, bright colours and all the lovely lines of rigging has felt like a creative right of passage long overdue. Sure I’ve done a quick sketch of a boat here and there, but nothing of real significance. Keen to put this right we booked a week in Beadnall, on the Northumberland coast, this past summer. Armed with my trusty Moleskine sketchbook, a hand full of coloured pencils, graphite and highlighter pens (ooh how I love a bit of neon) I found a suitable vantage point overlooking Beadnall Harbour and began to draw. The tide was low, the boats static in the sand and the moisture laden air of a sea fret rolled by. With a richly atmospheric view ahead and anticipation in my fingertips my hand already knew how it would move across the empty page.
Visualise to actualise
So many times I’ve traced in my mind the curve of a boats hull, the long line of the mast and the proud rise of bow rails, elegantly mirroring a contoured deck. This is how I know I really want to explore a subject. It’s like my hand can’t wait to hold the pencil and my fingers are already working out how they’ll make a mark on the paper. It’s a funny thing to explain and it’s a frustrating sensation to experience. Wanting so badly to make a drawing, but in this case, knowing you have to go all the way to the seaside to do it.
Years ago I remember watching a television program about a visualisation technique athletes use as part of their training. By sitting down and visualising in their mind a course they’ll run or game they’ll play they were expending the equivalent of 30% of the energy they would if physically engaged in the activity. Now my recollection of that figure may not be quite right, but either way it strikes me as a powerful tool for planning ahead. I’m almost certain I don’t consciously use this visualisation technique before drawing, however I often notice my mind has already begun to explore a subject, days, weeks or even months before I actually sit down to study it.
“Watching as sea green slowly slips up the sand and swirls silken water around stone and proudly standing keel.”
Elusive lines
A curious thing about visualising a subject before drawing it is learning to accept the disconnect between the imagined line and the real one. Inevitably, as any good drawing should, it takes on a life of it’s own as you observe what is really in front of you. Imaginings are great to get inspiration going but nothing beats seeing the real thing. Lines I thought would go one way actually go another and soon the first tentative marks give way to deeper, richer ones, culminating in an often elusive type of energy that skips across the page. These are the marks I love best. The wobbly ones, the awkward oddments, the loose free lines that look and feel effortless. Like anything worth achieving this combination of intensity and lightness of touch on a page comes from practice, repetition, huge amounts of desire to make it so and a good deal of forethought.
I’m not sure when I’ll next be at the seaside but I know in my soul I want to go. In the meantime my mind will continue to trace the shapes of these little boats until one day they might work their way into a painting. A painting that has had its brushstrokes imagined on a board, it’s colours conjured from snippets of memory and it’s shapes rolled around my mind like tumbled pebbles on the shore. Only then will it be ready to emerge and prove it’s self as a worthwhile subject to actualise.
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I’m off now to imagine more of my Beadnall boats bobbing around in that beautiful Northumbrian sea.