This started as a Staffordshire bull terrier but I kept adding more and more shaggy hair. I’m trying out Román García Mora’s suggestions for tonal drawing on an iPad, using his palette of four greys plus black and white in his Introduction to Procreate course.
In Procreate ‘Colour Drop’ is the equivalent of the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. It’s a ‘hidden’ tool activated by a drag and drop from the current colour swatch, which is always there in the top right-hand corner of the Procreate drawing screen.
Compared to pen on paper, I’m struggling to control my line when drawing on an iPad, even with a Paperlike screen protector (although after three or four months that has worn fairly smooth). For the lettering I tried Procreate’s method where you pause at the end of a line, curve or ellipse. Procreate works out what you were trying to draw and turns it into a smooth, editable vector version.
Drawing isometric shapes isn’t going to be my strong point.
My unaided line is too wobbly, the vector version to smooth but I’m sure I’ll hit on a ‘Goldilocks Zone’ version which will be just right!
Just in case you were wondering how I was getting on fifty years ago today in my second term at at the Royal College of Art . . .
On the morning of Friday 19 January 1973 I got to my first concert at the Royal Albert Hall, next door to the Kensington Gore Darwin Building where I was painting my ‘Greenhouse Mural’.
Met Judith Chapman a school friend of my brother’s when I went to buy my ticket
What splendid acoustics the Albert Hall has. There was a sharp noise at the beginning of Fidelio Overture which echoed . . . very dramatic. Andre Tchaikovsky played the piano in Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini by Rachmaninov . . .
Andre Tchaikovsky died in 1982 but his name still appears on the programme ofr productions of Hamlet because he bequeathed his skull to Royal Shakespeare Company.
In the afternoon I’d been in the Illustration Department discussing various projects with typographer Malcolm Winton. My idea that if I had a distraction-free month (in a lighthouse) I could finish my Natural History of Wakefield was mistaken. It took me another five years to get it into print.
So not surprisingly, back my room at the college student hostel, at 14 Evelyn Gardens, I was considering what progress I’d made and what I’d like to do next. Fifty years ago, in my diary for Monday 22 January 1973, I was contemplating the next fifty years:
Where am I now? Or, where would I have been if I hadn’t succeeded in getting a place here, for, as it happened, I didn’t manage to get a place on Post-Diploma.
Would I still be hawking round with folder and photocopies, staying with Dave and Linnie while I toured the London publishers?
Or would I be buried in a Northern Agency . . . or school museums?
Home: Poppleton’ Mill, Horbury Bridge, from my January 1972 sketchbook
Probably for I do not feel my illustrations or myself are competent or confident enough to take on real life. So I must get some work and working out done during this next 3 years . . . and get some outlets for my work going.
Planning for the next 50 years!
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry if I don’t work out everything of my art and attitude . . . if I did the next 50 years would be rather dull.
I think that my attitudes have hardly changed since I was seven or so.
The usual pattern for Monday mornings is that, while I sit and draw ducks, Barbara and her brother John walk off around the lake. Sadly not today as John was admitted to hospital yesterday. Monday mornings are just not going to be the same.
“Would you like to see what Richard’s been drawing?” asks Barbara.
“No,” says John.
“It’s good!” I reassure him.
“It’s always good when Richard draws it.” he replies.
Glad his condition hasn’t affected his aesthetic judgement.
On Román García Mora’s Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate course I’ve gone back to a ‘task’ in an earlier unit, ‘Sketching in Front of the TV’. On YouTube I’ve found a National Geographic video of Canada geese taking off and drawn them on freeze-frame.
Having drawn them so much from life with wings folded it’s interesting to see what happens when the wings open up.
More recent sketches on the iPad and in pen and ink and watercolour plus on today’s sketch of the railway bridge seen from Books on the Lane, Walton, a dash of Gold Blend coffee to create a blotchy ink wash.
Unfortunately our local art shop has been closed for a week due to the latest bout of flu so I’ve gone for an Eco Grey Leather A6 Freewriter with a ‘recycled’ cover made from an offcut of leather. The cover makes it difficult to scan, but the Chambers Biographical Dictionary is sufficient to flatten it on the scanner. The creamy coloured paper doesn’t take watercolour as well as my regular sketchbooks. I prefer white paper when I’m scanning watercolours.
But as a sort of pocket notebook it should be fine.
The sketchbook and pen were drawn in my A5 Seawhite travel journal and you can see it’s more sympathetic to watercolour.
No, this isn’t a goose watching its favourite anserine TV soap . . .
I’ve learnt a lot from the online course Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate but some of the ‘hidden’ features of the program are a bit difficult to grasp when the course is in Spanish and you’re trying to take in both subtitles and – to me – unfamiliar names on the Spanish version of the various tools and menus, so today I booked a free ‘Introduction to Procreate’ session at the Apple Store in Trinity Light in Leeds and I was able to delve into the mysteries of Alpha lock, importing a reference image and the various options for blending.
Rather than re-draw the Canada goose from my sketchbook, today I went to Procreate’s ‘Action’ menu and chose ‘Take a photo’ and used the rear camera of the iPad. I scaled up the photo to get the drawing I was after to fill the canvas.
Now that I’m more familiar with the process of putting together a drawing, following Román García Mora’s suggestions for an ‘illuminated drawing’, the next stage is to get more of the natural variation of watercolour washes into the illustration.
‘Pencil’ sketch, drawn on Procreate using an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro using Román’s ‘Graffito’ (‘graffiti’) brush.
Wet weather even for the ducks and geese this morning so I’m trying the process of drawing an animal in Procreate on an iPad Pro as suggested by Román García Mora in his Naturalist Animal Illustration with Procreate course on Domēstika.
His favourite style is what he calls ‘illuminated drawing’ in the tradition of 18th and 19th century natural history illustration where a line drawing of the animal was printed and the colour added by hand in watercolour, so you get the definition of an ink drawing and the luminosity of watercolour.
Drawing on a new layer in Procreat with Román’s ‘Entinado’ brush, using the pencil sketch as a guide. ‘Entinado’ means ‘stubborn’, perhaps referring to the regular quality of the line.
Line drawing.
Shadow layer (greyish light blue) and colour added with four of Román’s Procreate brushes.
