Working Toward Abstraction

 

4/30/26 Volunteer Park

Sometimes the all-mighty algorithm finally gets it right.

With my reignited love for Caran d’Ache Neocolor II water-soluble crayons, I’ve been looking around for unique or unusual ways that urban sketchers or mixed-media plein air artists are using them.

For quite a while, I wasn’t very inspired. A lot of YouTubers are swatching all the colors for their audience, but I wasn’t seeing much art that involved unique approaches or techniques.

Eventually Colin Woodward popped up in my YouTube feed. Primarily a watercolor and acrylic painter, the Irish artist has lately been exploring both Neocolor II crayons and Derwent Inktense pencils – and he sometimes takes them out for plein air work. A-ha – finally something new and appealing! I’ve been bingeing on his videos ever since.

Although he’s done a few urban scenes, most of his landscapes are of northern Ireland’s lovely woods and streams. His spare, abstract style involves nuanced brushwork to activate water-soluble pigments; in other words, he’s applying water the way a watercolor painter would. One thing I really like about his informative demos is that he explains subtleties like why he changed the grip on his crayon or chose a particular brush at that moment.

Without trying to emulate his brushwork style (which involves a lot of nice watercolor brushes that I don’t intend to use, especially in the field), I tried a sketch at Volunteer Park (top of post). (This type of multi-layered scene of different types of trees is exactly what I was practicing from home recently.) I used my same old waterbrush – but more actively than I typically would. For years now, my primary means of activating color in trees and other foliage has been to spritz the page lightly with water. I like the organic look that results – most of the time. But other times I’ve lost control of the amount of water or direction of the spray.

Central to my sketch is the dense foliage of a magnificent sequoia. That’s very different from the lighter, airier foliage of deciduous trees that I have watched Woodward draw. Still, I tried to be more conscious of the tree’s form as I activated in a more controlled manner.

5/1/26 Maple Leaf neighborhood

What my sketch above lacks is Woodward’s abstract elegance. The next day, still thinking of Woodward’s northern Irish landscapes, I stopped on my walk for a typical Tina landscape (about as far from northern Ireland as I could get!): a Maple Leaf alley, at right. In an A6-size Hahnemühle sketchbook, it’s difficult to do any kind of detail with chunky Neocolor crayons, so all I could do was make smudges of color for the trash cans. I like that forced abstraction!

Though my baby steps may not be obvious, I’ve been working toward greater abstraction for a while now. Sometimes it comes out because I’m cold and need to work extra fast. It’s a lot easier when I’m working from reference photos, I discovered. I can set myself an assignment to be looser and more abstract and then focus on that task in the comfort of my home. On location, I have so much “reality” in front of me that I tend to switch on auto-pilot urban sketching, which always comes out tighter and more “real.”

Detail from on-location comics

Another thing I’ve observed about my own process is that the comic-y, line-drawing sketches (example at left) I’ve been making the past couple of years go a long way in satisfying my need for capturing “reality” with no need for abstraction. The drawings are tight and descriptive for a reason, and I like them that way. Sometimes when I do both types in the same location (these sketches from a recent drink & draw are a good example), the part of me with a need for tightness relaxes and allows me to be more abstract. That insight is a big personal win!

My goal for this spring and summer, when I tend to use more color, will be to push myself a bit harder toward abstraction on location. Maybe Woodward’s inspiration will be the nudge I need.