Zytglogge
I entertain an idea that I can make retail art for sale to tourists visiting Bern.
Without going into too many details about my vision, I have a feeling that inexpensive art about local subjects could easily be sold from one of the many ateliers or galleries here in the old city. How naive, right?
Anyway, the first step is to get a simple workflow set up, where the hours invested per art piece is minimized. Hence, the charcoal. I’ve found you can lay down an incredible amount of rich, deep, black in a very short amount of time, given only the stub of a charcoal crayon. Then, the brilliant idea I had was to use pale watercolour (aquarelle) in large overlay swatches, to catch the eye of right-brained people, and make things more than just black and white.
As a test case, I just jammed in a typical Bernese architectural landscape of the Zytglogge clock tower — the quintessential Bern landmark for tourists — to find out what could possibly go wrong. Here’s what I learned:
- apply the watercolour before the charcoal — this is important — since charcoal follows wet brushes like neutral tint paint and makes everything black
- use rubber gloves when you’re doing charcoal, because it’s like ink, in that it doesn’t wash off your hands
- a border cutout sheet overlay stops one from drawing lines right to the edges of the page
- use sandpaper and another sheet to sharpen/form the charcoal crayon tip or edge to get the desired stroke width
- go really, really light on the number of lines in charcoal — too many makes it dark and foreboding
| Data | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | Zytglogge |
| Artist | Derrick Oswald |
| Medium | Charcoal and Watercolour on 200g/m2 100% cellulose, acid free, fine grain, natural white paper |
| Dimensions (w × h cm) | 42.0 × 29.7 |
| Date | 2025 |
