People on the precinct in Ossett were hurrying by in the cold, gloomy, afternoon rain, so I was grateful to be sketching them from the shelter of Bistro 42 after sampling a selection of tapas.
Passers-by were crossing my field of view so quickly that the only way to draw them was a to focus on an individual, take a mental photograph and then try to get the impression down on paper.
It makes a change for me to draw people. With natural history subjects, I’m keen to record enough visual information to identify a species of plant or animal but we’re all so familiar with humans as a species that the emphasis can instead be on trying to suggest character.
Pencil, Pen & Paint in Procreate
I drew in pen with no watercolour in my sketchbook but then redrew the figures on my new iPad Pro using a program suggested my comic artist friend John Welding. Procreate is more closely adapted to the possibilities of the iPad than Clip Studio Paint, the program that I’ve been using a lot recently, but I’ll keep coming back to Clip Studio because I like the page design tools that are incorporated into it.
I don’t normally draw in pencil because with the rough handling my sketchbooks get, pencil lines soon get smudged but I like the pencil tool in Procreate as a quick way for starting a drawing. There’s a tool for smudging it too, if you really want that.
Procreate gives the option to make a thirty-second movie of your drawing.
I love the movie. It gives a feeling of how you create the finished drawing.