Sketching along the pista #9

I often incorporate small elements of collage into my urban sketching. But I had never made an urban sketch almost entirely of collage. Until Monsaraz, that is. The view from the hotel window looked west across the Alentejo plains, picturesquely divided into small farms, with ranges of hills in the hazy distance. I had come prepared for this moment, with a small portfolio of old coloured paper scraps to which I added some ephemera from this extraordinary hilltop town.

To cut or to tear? That is the question. I mostly chose to tear as better suiting the casual landscape patterning. Some 1860s government blue paper formed hazy sky, touched with a dry stroke of Prussian blue watercolour. A cover leaf from the mid-nineteenth century Archivo Universal: revista hebdomadaria provided distant hills. The cream frontispiece of an old book and ochre paper added just the right colour for the paddocks, while fragments of marbelled book endpapers, brown wrapping paper, and some contemporary ephemera touched on the details.