April sketch group

Yesterday's meeting took place in Town Gardens - a Victorian style park in the old town area of Swindon.  Threatened showers cleared to give us a reasonably mild morning with some welcome glimpses of sun.  I had previously sketched the ornate bandstand here, so decided to try the Aviary which houses quite a variety of exotic small birds.

Town Gardens Aviary - fine liner pen, Pentel brush pen and watercolour crayons
on Hahnemuhle Grey Paper

I was trying out some newly acquired watercolour wax crayons and am not really happy with my efforts.  The background trees were far too bright, so I scribbled over some black crayon and was able to try out a scraffito effect to add a bit of texture.

I definitely need to practice with these a bit more to achieve better results.

I was impressed with the sketches by this artist pat.southernpearce and wanted to attempt something similar.

Test colours on tan paper (Paperchase sketchbook) -
water added on the righthand side

Colours tested on Arches wc paper - white crayon has been
added over the six colours at the bottom which has muted
 them slightly