Chris Bates - Art demonstration - September 2025

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Drawing to digital and back

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A local artist from Barrow upon Soar, Chris explained how his process has changed from very detailed pen and ink art, through a looser process, moving through digital work before settling back into the detailed work that he enjoys, working with coloured pencil and watercolour. 

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Chris is used to working on a large scale. This comes at least in part from design jobs at Ind Coope Brewery (where part of his pay was two pints a day) and shoe shops based in Leicester. ​

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Chris used an existing sketch of a 1620s house in Hugglescote as the subject for his new painting.

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Using a White Knights watercolour set that started pared back but has gradually been added to. 

For the sky, Chris wetted the page and then added Cerulean blue and then Payne’s grey to add some thundery clouds. To avoid cauliflowers and control the paint better Chris advises picking up and adding paint rather than continually dipping the brush into the paint.

To form clouds, dip toilet roll into water and use to gently lift off some paint. Once the paint is dry, Chris goes in with his pencils keeping them on their sides to avoid scoring lines and using a circular motion emphasising the shading, particularly for dark areas. 

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Chris uses a round brush with a decent point but rarely uses the point. He leaves his pallet dirty as the colours left behind are great for things like shadows and stones. 

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Chris demonstrated the pen work, going over his pencil sketch, using a 0.03 pen. He advises not using a straight line but short lines and dots, you can make lines very quickly, incorporating some scribbled sections and marking some but not all the bricks/stones. Chris mentioned that when doing buildings he adds the gutters but never the down pipes as they break up the building. People never notice apparently! 

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Chris advises that if you want to you can enlarge and grid up a photo to make the drawing process easier. When Chris is out he takes a sketch book and a camera. He enjoys the freedom that sketching gives and advises only spending 20-30 mins on a sketch. Don’t worry about mistakes and merge colours using your thumb. At home he decides whether or not to add paint. 

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For the mullioned windows Chris selects some of the panes to fill out with black, remembering the direction of light and that it is the shadows that provide the definition. Chris added some soft coloured pencil for the shadow, then used some yellow ochre for the building. He then used wet toilet paper to dab it off before drying. 

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Chris always stretches his paper. He takes a piece of paper, decides which is the face and puts f on it. He wets the reverse then puts it on the board, rolls across to flatten and then tapes it. He finds it always leaves a perfect surface to draw onto. 

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“You spend the first 30 years learning what to put into your picture and the next 30 learning what to leave out.”

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After the break Chris shared some detailed pictures of buildings, a map of Barrow upon Soar featuring lots of individual paintings and a book for which he had provided the illustrations. From that he illustrated a book about the Flying Scotsman followed up with some children’s books to teach them to read. Due to an issue with getting the heads right, Chris got into using Photoshop to work with the individual components until they were right. From a pencil drawing dropped into Photoshop then coloured in, Chris showed us some 20s style railway posters he had produced. 

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Chris shared his work on flower pictures, telling us about his ‘road kill’ insects such as bees and butterflies, taken home and incorporated into artwork featuring flowers and fruit. 

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Starting work on an autumnal painting of apples, Chris used a small amount of paint for the leaves then went in with a water-soluble sketching pencil, once dry going in with the coloured pencils. He demonstrated how to do a raindrop.

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