Category: Drawing

1967

In 1967, aged 16, I’d just finished my O-levels and was looking forward to starting a foundation course at Batley School of Art. I used homemade scraperboard (wax crayon covered with india ink, which I then scratched into. You could buy a special nib) for the historical characters, which were inspired by a day trip to York but I soon turned to a dip pen with the finest nib I could find.

At the V&A and at Oxford, I was on the look out for illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, which I’d decided to illustrate as a comic strip. Looking back, it’s a shame I didn’t try illustrating it with the scraperboard technique. It would have been more expressive but more difficult to control.

Homemade Water Plant Basket

Our purple iris in the pond is top heavy, as we haven’t transplanted it from the small pond plant basket it came in.

We cut down an old plastic plant pot and drilled extra holes on its sides. We put a few pebbles in it for ballast before adding ordinary garden soil and planting the iris.

We used an off cut from an old tea towel, spread around the iris to hold the soil in place and added a few more pebbles to hold that in place.

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Categorized as Drawing

Freehand Perspective

freehand perspective drawing

I’m drawing our sparrow nestbox for a forthcoming article in The Dalesman and, rather than draw it from life or trace it from a photograph, I’m trying freehand perspective. I didn’t draw an horizon line or plot vanishing points, I just drew as near to the way they appear in a photograph.

Having used ruler and set square for the pencil, I’ll use my usual freehand fountain pen for the drawing itself, so hopefully it will looked relaxed but plausible.

Gatepost

gatepost

To give the gatepost a black and white treatment, I marked the shapes of the shadows – the spot blacks as they’re called in comics – with an ‘x’, then filled in with a Pentel Brush Pen. Drawn using a Lamy nexx with a bold nib.

Hilary’s

Hilary's, Cawthorne

Looking at Hilary’s cafe from the garden you can guess which was the original cottage and in what order the adjacent cottage, lean-to extensions and extensions of extensions were added.

Haversack

haversack

After my practice at cross-hatching using a dip pen on a tilted drawing board, I looked around for an object to draw and went for this Lowe Alpine haversack.

the boathouse, Newmillerdam

The wind has just changed from mild, from the mid-Atlantic, to cold from the north-east, so I sat with a latte to warm me up as I started this drawing at the Boathouse Cafe at Newmillerdam this morning. I used my Lamy nexx fountain pen but I think, now I’ve scanned them both in ‘text’ mode, pure black and white, that it would be hard to spot the difference between this and the dip pen in the haversack drawing.

The black areas were brushed in later from a photograph I’d taken on my phone, outlined with a Rotring Tikky Graphic pigmented ink pen and filled with a number 10 Prolene series 101 synthetic brush using the Rohrer’s india ink which I used with the dip pen.

Drawing Board

drawing board

In Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden recommend drawing with your board angled at approximately 60 degrees. My old cast iron letterpress gives me just the right angle to prop the board against, which I’m resting on my knees. My parallel motion drafting board can’t be manoeuvred to that angle.

cross hatching

They also recommend always drawing with arm movements when you’re working in pen, so definitely not my the finger movements that I always go for in my detailed work. I’m going to try some of the exercises they suggest for getting used to working with a dip pen.

drawing at the drawing board

It’s going to take a lot of getting used to but I like the feeling of making marks on what feels to me like a near-vertical surface. Bristol board, also recommended in Abel & Madden’s book, doesn’t tear as I scratch away with my dip pen and it gives a crisp line with no bleeding into the fibres of the paper surface.

writing on the drawing board

Link

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures website

Duck-feeders

man on park bench

I stuck to black and white at Newmillerdam this morning – a B-nib Lamy filled with De Atramentis ink and a Pentel brush pen.

When people are wearing bright yellow or blue, it’s tempting to add that as a flat wash but I’m experimenting with black and white for my werewolf comic, to create an inky gothic atmosphere.

Also as an experiment, I scanned these at 600 dpi (dots per inch) in ‘1 bit B/W’, reducing everything to either pure black or white.

Peasants from Flagey

peasants, after Courbet

For my werewolves project I need one or two French peasants who claim to have encountered a loup garou, so I’ve taken a look at Courbet’s Peasants from Flagey.

For the werewolf itself, I thought that the lean look of this wolf sculpture from Chatsworth might be the way to go.

Laburnum Stump

laburnum stump

This morning I drew what remains of the old laburnum behind the aviaries at the top end of the Fish Pond (now more likely to be referred to as the Duck Pond) at Thornes Park.

There was more of the tree left when I drew it for my ‘Thornes Park’ booklet over twenty years ago, and it was still hanging onto a few living branches. The aviary has had a major revamp since then.