Category: Drawing

The Water Margin

brush drawing

I’m reading James A. Michener’s The Hokusai Sketchbooks, so this morning at Newmillerdam, as a change from pen and watercolour, I’ve gone for Chinese brush and Noodler’s Black Ink.

Noodler's Ink and Chinese brushes

Lying in the lakeside mud beside me, was a freshwater mussel shell, so I used that as a suitably oriental-looking palette to mix my grey ink wash. I dipped my cup in the water and, as I started to paint, realised that I’d caught two small water creatures – water beetles perhaps – which I released unharmed at the end of my session.

close-up of brush drawing

I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.

drawing by the lake

In England, our school holidays have now started and the lakeside path was a bit busier than usual however, in this willowy backwater, I had this corner of floating world to myself. Just me and a few passing mallards and a coot that came ashore within a few feet of me, apparently oblivious of me until I moved.

It’s there in the bottom right-hand corner of my drawing.

Digitally Drawn

Sketches Pro

As for once I hadn’t taken my sketchbook with me, I literally drew with a digit yesterday, using a finger on my iPhone screen in Tayasui Sketches Pro (left) as we sat with a mint and lime drink in the shaded courtyard of Horbury’s Flamingo Teapot Cafe but after all the large-scale pen and watercolour work that I’ve done for my Redbox Gallery show, I felt that it was about time I tried drawing with my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro again.

The man in the hat and the sumac were drawn in Adobe Fresco, using its virtual ‘Blake’ pen for the drawing.

Paperlike

Would I find it easier if I used a matt screen protector, like Paperlike, on my iPad, to give it a more natural feel? Or a rubberised tip for the Apple Pencil, to give it a hint of resistance as it moves over the glass screen?

Adobe Fresco sketch

Drawing on the iPad is never going to be as familiar to me as pen on paper but I’m keen to have the best possible image so I’d have to avoid any matt screen protector because it adds a very slight amount of colour fringing to the image.

Heads Up

grids for copying drawing

It may seem obtuse to turn my artwork upside down as I enlarge my characters from A3 to A1 with the aid of a grid, but with such a large sheet of foamboard, it’s easier to reach the top this way. When it came to the faces, I drew a tighter grid to help me get the details in proportion.

Besides, as Betty Edwards points out in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, upside-down drawing helps you make the shift to ‘R-mode’, so that the logical left side of the brain isn’t continually saying ‘Ah, I know what this is . . .’ (a nose, for example) ‘so don’t need to look so carefully now’. When you switch over to your right side, she suggests, you draw the shapes as they are, without preconceptions.

Even so, when I came to the eyes of these characters, I could feel myself thinking, no, that’s not right, that doesn’t feel as if I’m drawing an eye.

Look forward to turning the board right side up.

On the Grid

I’ve started on the main characters for my Redbox Gallery, with a cloth-capped Patrick Stewart as Joby’s father and Joby himself, played by Richard Tolan.

rough for Joby illustration

I’ve gridded up my A3 drawing, ready to transfer to A1-size foamboard.

My little rough yesterday was sketchy enough to suggest the figures but now I’ve started defining them more, I’m going to have to tidy things up a bit, hopefully without losing the liveliness of the rough.

stork cut-outs

And what’s this, down at our garden pond? These foamboard cut-out storks might seem too big for a phone box-sized gallery but I’ve checked that out with my little scale-model mock-up and they should fit in nicely. Being white, they should show up well in what can be a rather dimly-lit space.

Boxed In

mock-up of phone box display

This morning we took a look at a gardening display in the old telephone box at Horbury Bridge, which included a small selection of items – a tomato plant, a pair of gardening gloves and a trowel – to tell its story. It made me realise that the simpler and bolder my display for the Redbox Gallery, the better.

My main characters were always going to be Joby and his dad from Stan Barstow’s novel and I realise that including historical characters, such as railway and canal engineers, will overload the display.

Watching the closing scene of Yorkshire Television’s 1975 production of Joby on YouTube, I’ve found a perfect exchange of dialogue which will work as the keynote for my show. I’d been thinking of phrases to sum up Addingford such as ‘just ten minutes walk from this phone box’ and ‘Horbury’s unofficial nature park’, which would be fine but I don’t want too many text boxes. People often skip reading labels but dialogue is more compelling.

As we’re trying to get people to stop briefly and peer into the box, we need something eye-catching – like the pocket cartoon amongst the articles in a newspaper – to hook passers by.

Redbox Mock-up

Addingford Steps

I’ve added a light watercolour wash to my sketch map and to the Addingford Steps A1-size pen and ink artwork, keeping it light so that it shows up when viewed through the windows of the Redbox Gallery.

sketch map

These two panels are the backdrop and the cut-out figures that are the main event.

mock-up
scale model

I’ve printed small scale versions to try for size in my mock-up phone box.

I feel that the Redbox is more like a shop window than a regular gallery. Five minutes wouldn’t be long to spend wander around a small show in a regular gallery, but five minutes peering into a phone box would be a lot to ask.

Step by Step

drawing board

I hadn’t realised how abstract and scribbly my artwork was in close-up until I scaled this drawing of Addingford Steps. I drew a grid over my A4 print, but the original is just six inches tall.

scaling up
I drew with my Lamy Nexx fountain pen with a 1.1mm italic nib using DeAtramentis Archive Ink, which dries quickly on this smooth paper surface and becomes waterproof.

It was like doing a jigsaw: the individual squares sometimes didn’t look like anything at all, also, because I’m working on A1 foamboard in portrait format, I turned the artwork on its side, so that it was easier to reach, and painted it in two halves, so some things, such as the perspective of the foreground handrail, didn’t make any sense to me until I saw it right way up.

Just the watercolour to add now, which is a a quick job compared with reconstructing my drawing.

Squaring Up

grid

For my Redbox Gallery show, I’m enlarging a map from my Walks around Horbury from A4 to A1, so I’ve drawn a grid to scale it up.

I was looking for a bigger and bolder equivalent for the fountain pen of the original with but I found that my Pentel Brushpen took too long to dry on the resistant surface of the foamboard, so I’ve gone for a fine point Sharpie.

I’ve experimented with colour and it looks as if coloured ink will be my best option.

Return to Silkwood Farm

foxglove

The Silkwood Farm, Junction 40, Ossett: Pigeons and a magpie fly over a square of grassy waste ground between the vehicle testing centre and the snack van. Over the past year as we’ve driven past, I’ve looked forward to being back here again with Barbara’s brother John, after a morning’s walk around Newmillerdam. It feels good to be able to do something normal again and with the tables set out with social distancing in mind there’s a relaxed, airy ambience.

waste ground adjacent to The Silkwood Farm

Moorhen

moorhen

As a change from drawing at Newmillerdam this morning, I took my camera – an Olympus E-M10 II with a 60mm 1:2.8 macro lens, which proved versatile as with the flick of a switch I could change from the close-ups of meadowsweet, red campion and marsh bedstraw to the coots, moorhen and mallard on the lake and I even managed a quick shot of a carrion crow perching the back of a rustic bench.

mallard and duckling
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Categorized as Drawing