As I draw the hyacinth, there’s a scent that reminds me of bluebell woods, a reminder that in a week’s time the days will be starting to get longer so spring isn’t too far away.
Poinsettia and Hyacinth
Month: December 2024
Young Heron
A young heron looking suitably bedraggled in the rain in Regent’s Park last month.
Pigeon
We’re on to planning our animation project on my Procreate Dreams animation course.
For the purposes of this project we need to keep the character design as simple as possible. It may be just 10 to 15 seconds of animation but at 24 frames per second that will potentially involve hundreds, even thousands of drawings.
Old Glove
My favourite gardening gloves are worn through at the fingers, so a good subject for another textures drawing for my Procreate Dreams course.
The various texture brushes will have their uses but I like to be in control so my favourite way of creating a texture is to hand draw it, in this case with Procreate’s Dry Ink brush.
Hyacinth Jar
Three stages of a drawing in Procreate experimenting with different ways of showing textures in an iPad drawing. This is a practical exercise from Brooke Eggleston’s Procreate Dreams animation course on Domestika. For this exercise we went back to the original version of Procreate which has a wider range of drawing tools.
6B Pencil
At first I stuck with the virtual 6B Pencil, which felt close to my regular fountain pen sketchbook drawings.
Smudge Tool
As an illustrator I like to keep things clearly defined, so that the final printed version stays sharp, so stage 2, where I start creating tone by smudging with a virtual Damp Brush, isn’t my usual approach.
The nearest to that in my sketchbooks is when I’m using soluble ink in a fountain pen and I brush over with a drop of water to create a pen and wash effect.
Texture Brushes
In the final stage I used some of the preset texture brushes such as Twisted Tree, Heavy Metal and Rusted Decay from Procreate’s folder of Industrial brushes. I tried to find equivalents for the cross section of soil, roots and moss in the jar and for the sprouting hyacinth leaves.
There are various sparkle brushes available in Procreate but I felt the best way to get the effect of highlights in the glass was to knock back everything but the highlights by brushing in tone, in this case with a Short Hair brush from a Procreate course I took a couple of years ago.
This was intended to be an observational drawing but I could imagine some of those texture brushes being useful if you were trying to evoke a particular style: such as a 19th-century engraving.
I’d come back to this exercise again.
A Useful Tip
On a practical note, I tried replacing the PenTips tip of my Apple Pencil, which I’ve been using for at least a year, perhaps even two. That and cleaning the PenTips magnetic clip-on textured screen protector with my glasses spray and a microfibre cloth seemed to give me better control – more of a feel of drawing on paper.