Sketching from life
As the group of bull elephants browse around me, I watch them carefully, pick one out, and start sketching him in pen. I’m working fast because he’s constantly changing position but I’m also trying to add only the lines I need, keeping my sketch simple. I’ll usually add watercolor later, using just my memory and imagination, but for now I need to concentrate on adding another elephant, to complete my composition. The day is warming up, spurfowls pick through the leaf litter, and all around are the sounds of elephants feeding. I am in my element, sketching from life.
Why is sketching from life so important? It teaches me about anatomy, making me a better artist; it gives me a real understanding of people’s lives; I learn about the behavior of different animal species; I gain confidence and sharpen my concentration; and it allows me to slow down and take in everything around me. Whether I sketch people, a landscape or animals, I have to see and understand my subject, so when I look back at my sketches I am immediately immersed in the scene again, remembering the temperature, sounds and smells as well as the subject of my sketch.
I frequently start by sketching the body of an animal, because its head is likely to move a lot more than its body. For example, when I started Spotted Hyena Watching Impala, the hyena was lying with its head on the floor, looking straight at me. I sketched its body and as I finished, the impala appeared and the hyena looked back at them. I quickly sketched the hyena’s head and made some minor amendments to the body position, but then the impala noticed the hyena, snorted an alarm and disappeared. The hyena got up and walked away.
Further along the road I saw the impala and added simple impala shapes into my sketch. Back at camp I added the watercolor, using memory and imagination. Knowing what to sketch first and what can be added later is a skill I have learned through years of trial and half-finished sketches!
Materials
While living in Zimbabwe and Botswana I experimented with many different sketch materials. Charcoal and pastel are great sketching materials, but our camping trips weren’t kind to artworks that might smudge, so I abandoned attempts to work with those in the bush. We had a double-cab (pickup) and were usually bouncing around on thick sandy roads in the Kalahari, moving campsites every few days and I needed materials that dried fast and could be packed up quickly. One time I had carefully positioned myself on the roof rack to sketch when a pack of African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) appeared on the salt pan in the distance and I had literally a few seconds to get down with my paints before we were bumping along to get a closer view.
Nowadays my sketch kit consists of a long pencil case and my sketchbook. The pencil case contains pencils; pens; bulldog clips; 3 paint brushes with tubes covering the bristles; an eraser; a small water container; and a Winsor & Newton field set of watercolors. I’ve become adept at sketching in tiny spaces in a vehicle, or standing up with my sketchbook in the crook of my arm, paints in the same hand and my brush in the other. Back at camp I’ll add a brush stand to keep my brushes out of the sand, a large mixing palette and large water container. This has been my setup for 10 years now and it perfectly fits my methods and style.
Art and Conservation
For several years I’ve made donations to conservation from every sale of my work and it’s no surprise that an artist who sketches and paints wildlife would do so, but my work with conservation organizations has helped me as much as I have helped them. I’ve been able to vastly increase my knowledge of complex conservation issues and my art has changed too. For example, I thought I wasn’t interested in sketching people, but in 2011 that all changed when I visited African People & Wildlife (APW) in Tanzania. I had approached them in 2010 with the idea of visiting them on the Maasai Steppe to sketch on site, learn about their work and put together an exhibition and lecture series in the US to raise awareness and funds.
APW works to ‘find the balance for communities and nature’ by partnering with local communities to create effective, sustainable solutions that improve the lives of rural Africans while protecting the natural world. When I visited in 2011, 2012 and 2014, I taught art classes in schools and at the APW Children’s Summer Camp; learned about APW’s work, including their hugely successful Living Walls which prevent human-wildlife conflict; and of course, I sketched for hours every day. To my great surprise, I found I really enjoyed sketching people. I admit that for a sketch artist the colorful robes of the Maasai were impossible to resist, but I also appreciated that I was able to see real life in a rural community, and was able to jettison any lingering shyness about being watched as I sketched. Sometimes I had to ask people to continue going about their business because I’d look up from my paper to find the people I had been sketching were now standing behind me looking over my shoulder. Sketching takes time and this is appreciated is rural communities where the pace of daily life is pleasantly slower than what I’m used to back home. I send laminated copies of my sketches to everyone who appears in them and have really enjoyed the relationships I have built with people in local communities and with APW’s Tanzanian staff. I visited again in June this year, have plans for more art related programs there in the future, was delighted to be asked to join APW’s International Advisory Council recently.
Purple zebra and other anomalies
I have learned to be careful which sketches I show to children in rural communities because they’ll look at my sketchbook and ask ‘where did you see this purple zebra’ or they just tell me, while looking at a blue elephant sketch, that I have painted this animal wrong. It was particularly interesting to bring large canvas prints of some of my paintings to APW and hang them as an exhibit at a school, along with art by the children in my classes. I explained why I choose certain colors – reds and oranges to show the heat of the day, or blues and purples for shadows. The children were very interested and asked a lot of pertinent questions. We followed up with an environmental quiz and when a child answered a question correctly, they were able to choose one of my laminated sketches to keep. I think all the realistic-colored animal sketches were chosen first.
Alison Nicholls
My route to becoming an artist started in my late 20’s after my husband, Nigel, asked for a transfer with his company, Arup, to Zimbabwe, in 1994. It was here that I reconnected with my childhood passions for art and wildlife, and picked up pencils and paintbrushes. We had no internet, no home phone, no cellphone, and no email, but we had a garden full of amazing birds and insects to draw, so I practiced drawing in the sunshine. Moving to neighboring Botswana in 1996, I worked part-time (wearing my other hat as an IT consultant) and painted part-time. It’s interesting to look back on those early paintings and see hints of my future watermedia style. Leaving Botswana in 2002 and moving to the East coast of the US was, ironically, the time when I decided to paint African subject matter fulltime. I worked primarily in pastel for a few years but think of 2006 as the year I really turned professional as a watermedia artist. Sometimes I wish I’d started painting earlier in life, but then I wouldn’t have had the life and work experience which has helped me navigate the online world, so important in marketing my art. My connections with conservation organizations began in 2007 after being awarded an Artists For Conservation Flag Expedition grant, which allowed me to spend 6 weeks at Painted Dog Conservation in Zimbabwe, tracking and sketching highly endangered African wild dogs or painted dogs. This led to my contacting APW in 2010 to conduct a similar series of visits. Nowadays, connections with conservation organizations are a vital part of my work and have led to the creation of a body of conservationthemed paintings which can be seen on my website. In turn, conservationists connected me with rural African communities, and as a result I’m devising an artmentoring program for young people who show promise as artists (if you would like to get involved, please feel free to contact me). In 2015 Nigel and I became shareholders (very minor shareholders, I might add!) in Limpopo-Lipadi, a private game reserve in Botswana’s Tuli Block, on the banks of the Limpopo River. It’s a beautiful place to relax and sketch, and hopefully my art-mentoring can play a part in Limpopo-Lipadi’s Motse Community Project which aims to ensure that local communities benefit from the existence of the reserve. Even though it sounds like a cliché, moving to southern Africa changed every aspect of my life, allowing me to now say I am an artist inspired by Africa.
