Month: April 2021

Katherine Parkinson

Katherine Parkinson

Katherine Parkinson’s character Mary sits for her portrait in Lights Up: Sitting on BBC4 this evening. Writing the play and acting the single character who appears – we never glimpse the artist – she’s caught the awkwardness of most life class poses in the photograph in this week’s Radio Times.

After six or seven years I gave up on the weekly life class at Wakefield College because, looking back on my drawings, I preferred some of the early ones to my later efforts. The five-minute poses that the tutor used to start off the class livened things up a bit but for a pose that the model had to hold for an hour the possibilities were somewhat limited.

Katherine Parkinson

These days I prefer draw people on location, preferably while I’m sitting outside a coffee shop, which could be a possibility starting next week.

Some Chicken

Chicken animation

With animation, it’s so important to understand the motivation and emotional state of your character. Obviously an aerial predator is swooping low over the coop and the little red hen is raising the alarm.

Either that or it’s trying to lay an extra large egg.

Animation drawn in Clip Studio Paint using an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Hen & Pencil

hen pencil animation

After the unpredictable floppy rabbit’s ears in my last animation, I decided to try a pencil stage with this alarmed chicken.

This wasn’t drawn directly in pencil in my sketchbook as suggested here – although a flick-book would be fun to try – it’s the pencil tool in Clip Studio Paint. I shall now move on to the inking stage.

hen sketch

Drawing John Malkovich

Poirot

I enjoyed John Malkovich’s older Hercule Poirot solving The ABC Murders a few years ago, introducing a rather darker version of the detective and convincingly evoking what I imagine a 1930s atmosphere should be. I loved that he had an apartment in the mansions near the Royal Albert Hall, as that was such a familiar spot in my student days as I walked to and from the Kensington Gore building of the Royal College of Art.

John Malkovich

I’m studying Quentin Blake’s approach to illustration at the moment which is why I’ve tried to free up my drawing here. Blake’s hands are rarely observed with anatomical precision but they’re so confidently drawn and so expressive of the individual character that they look completely convincing.

But I feel uncomfortable deliberately drawing hands so rapidly, without attempting to observe every individual joint. Folds in material I’m happier with, as they’re fluid and semi-abstract anyway.

Inspector Barnaby

DCI Barnaby

Yes, he has turned out looking rather like Ralph Vaughan Williams in my drawing but this is rumpled Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby, Neil Dudgeon’s lead character in ITV’s Midsomer Murders.

Four Lions
poster

Hopefully the good inspector won’t have any trouble from these characters, Riz Ahmed’s Omar and Kayvan Novak’s Waj, the hapless northerners in Four Lions who attempt to train crows as bombers. I love the expression on the crow’s face.

And I’m sure that no crows were harmed during location filming in the hills around Sheffield.

Sanjeev Bhaskar and Prof John Wright

These were all drawn from photographs in last week’s Radio Times, as was Sunny, played by Sajeev Bhaskar, another character from Unforgotten. Professor John Wright is a clinician and epidemiologist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary.

Easter Bunny

rabbit animation

Step 2 in my attempts at Dermot O’ Connor’s LinkedIn animation tutorial.

frames from the animation

There are 32 frames in this 24 frames per second animation. I like the way the rabbit’s expression changes with just a few changes to the lines. The blue and green shapes in frames 1 and 4 are a feature called onion-skinning. Blue represents the previous frame – as if seen through tracing paper – and green the next frame. By drawing an ‘in-between’, halfway between the two, it should be possible to get a smooth movement. The difficulty is keeping details consistent.

roughs

O’Connor suggests starting off a simple animation with a beginning and an end quick sketch of the action and one at the halfway stage.

action arc

Once you’ve drawn those key frames you get an idea of where the action is going and you plot arcs, so that things move smoothly.

I plotted an arc for the rabbits right ear but thought that I wouldn’t need one for the left. As a result it flops about aimlessly!

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Helana Attlee

Helena Attlee

I had probably held more birds than stringed instruments, and the feeling reminded me of scooping a hen from its perch, its body always lighter than I expect, and pulsing with life.

Helena Attlee, Lev’s Violin, 2021

Helena Attlee, author of An Italian Adventure and The Land Where Lemons Grow, The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit, appears on the Books Page of this week’s Radio Times, on the trail of the “mongrel history” of a worn and weathered violin in her new book Lev’s Violin.

Link

Helena Attlee