The 30-Minute Sketch: Sequence and Clean-Up

Everything you have practised separately in the last modules – working dark to light, thinking in shapes, mixing with few colours, placing light – now comes together into one sequence. Outdoors, time is not a side issue: the light moves, the bus arrives, your fingers get cold. A fixed schedule takes the decision of when to do what off your hands, and that is exactly what makes the sketch better in the end, not worse.

Minute 0 to 3: Subject and Crop

Three minutes, not a second more. Walk a few steps, hold your hands together to form a frame and settle on a crop in which three things are clear: where the darkest spot sits, where the lightest one sits, and what the big shape is that carries the picture. If you search longer, you are usually not searching for a subject but for reassurance. Sit down as soon as you have an edge, a roof or a tree that divides the surface.

Minute 3 to 5: The Value Thumbnail

Two minutes of pencil, thumb-sized, in a corner of the page or on a scrap of paper. You are not drawing details but three levels of brightness: light, mid, dark. If this tiny box reads on its own, the large sketch will work too. If it looks muddy, change the crop now – that costs you twenty seconds instead of twenty minutes.

Minute 5 to 10: Underpainting

Five minutes for a thin, heavily diluted layer in a mid tone – a muted brown, a greyish blue, whatever suits the mood. With it you cover the white of the paper and roughly establish where the masses lie. Work with the widest brush you have and let the edges stay imprecise. This layer will later be almost completely covered; its only job is to take away the intimidating white and to show you that your mid tones really are mid tones.

Minute 10 to 18: Darks and Mid Tones

The longest phase, eight minutes, and the most important one. Now you paint opaquely: first the darkest areas, then the mid tones, each in large, connected shapes. No window bars, no leaves, no lettering. Think in silhouettes – a house wall is one shape, the tree crown is one shape, the shadow on the street is one shape. Hold the brush flat and put down few, decisive strokes. If you notice you are painting a detail, you are too early.

Minute 18 to 25: Lights and Accents

Seven minutes for what opaque paint exists for: light that sits on top. Take the paint thicker, almost impasto, and place brightness only where the sun or a lamp actually hits – a roof edge, a window lintel, the wet stripe on the asphalt. Add a few accents: a dark doorway, a signal colour, a figure as a stroke with a head. Count along: three to five lights, two to three accents. More makes the picture flatter, not richer.

Minute 25 to 30: Looking and Stopping

In the last five minutes you paint almost nothing. You lay the sketch on the ground or lean it against the bench and step two metres away. From two metres all the untidy edges disappear and you only see the structure: Do the darks hold? Does the light glow? Can you tell in one second what it is about? If so, the picture is finished, even if ten spots look unfinished up close. That is exactly the moment when beginners' pictures usually get overworked to death. Allow yourself at most two corrections and pack up.

Practical Matters: Drying Out, Smudging, Hard Brushes

Acrylic dries on the palette in minutes, gouache in the sun even faster. A small spray bottle of water for a few francs is the most important accessory you own: a mist over the palette every few minutes and your mixtures stay usable. Take a palette with a lid so you can simply snap it shut when you move on. Gouache stays re-soluble after drying and therefore smudges onto the facing page – put a sheet of baking paper or tracing paper between the pages before you close the book. And wash your brushes out immediately, while you are still sitting at the subject. Dried acrylic in the belly of the brush cannot be saved, and a brush that has gone hard costs you more than any paint.

Series: The Same Subject, Three Kinds of Weather

Once a sequence sits, the subject becomes a testing ground. Find a corner you pass often and paint it three times in thirty minutes: once in sunshine with hard shadows, once under a grey sky with no direction, once at dusk with warm windows in cold blue. You will see that the drawing and the crop barely change, but the values and the colour temperature change completely. Three such sheets side by side will teach you more about light than ten different subjects.

Exercise

Find a spot outdoors or at an open window and set yourself four timers: at 3, 5, 10, 18 and 25 minutes. Follow the sequence strictly, even if a phase ends unfinished – especially then. Stick to the last five minutes without a brush and do the two-metre test. Then close the palette, wash the brushes, insert the interleaving sheet. Photograph the sketch in even light, without the shadow of your hand, and upload it in the Coach. Add one sentence about which phase was too short for you – that is the one you will get under control first next time.