Category: Drawing

Dust Sheet

dustsheet

I often end up drawing modular chairs when I’m in a waiting room but today I’m in luck, the decorators are here and they’ve left a folded dust sheet and a little still life of carpet tiles and cardboard cartons stacked in a bin. I can get absorbed in the deep folds of the sheet just as I might if I was up in the Dales drawing a rock face. Why should a dust sheet make a more fascinating subject than a modular chair? Writing in a different context, author Lia Leendertz suggests a reason in her article Our garden, our refuge in this month’s The Garden:

‘When I felt calm and happy there, it may have been because my garden contains plenty of ‘fascination’ – a not-very-scientific-sounding, but entirely scientific concept which suggests that or brains are calmed by certain shapes, such as unfurling fern fronds and the centres of aeoniums.’

Lia Leendertz, The Garden, December 2020

Link

Lia Leendertz, garden writer and author living in Bristol

RHS, the Royal Horticultural Society publish The Garden magazine

Tai-Shan

Tai-Shan

Dannii Minogue was our model for Sky Arts’ last one-hour live session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I wanted to go back to my regular sketchbook style, the quick sketches that I’d do if we were watching people go by from a cafe, rather than building up a single drawing, as I did in previous weeks.

I struggled with Dannii but presenter and portrait painter Tai-Shan Schierenberg worked better as a quick drawing. I’ll miss the weekly sessions but I feel that I’m getting geared up to travelling around with a sketchbook and hope that before too long in the new year we’ll have more freedom to travel.

sketches

One-point Perspective

perspective drawing

It’s back to the drawing board with the online course that I started last summer, Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art. This was the technical challenge, to draw a re-imagined version of your room in one-point perspective. Mattias suggested that once we’d established the framework, we should add a few hand-drawn touches but I decided that I’d like to stick with the drafting head on my parallel motion drawing board for all the right angles, adding the perspective lines with a ruler.

Elderman

Elder man

“Respect your elders?! Don’t make me laugh.” grumbles Sam Bucus, village elder, when I bump into him on our Monday morning stroll in Illingworth Park, “Hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple . . . they’re all included in Doctor Hooper’s hedgerow dating system except, you guessed it, elder! We’re the forgotten shrubs in the hedge.”

“And did I tell you about the time I auditioned for the part of Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy? Too wooden, indeed!”

elder man

Everything in this Photoshop collage was photographed in the Park, this time on a rather dull grey morning, which actually proved useful when constructing the figure as I didn’t have any conspicuous highlights and shadows to deal with. To tie him in with the background, I added a transparent shadow layer, using greens and browns taken with the eye-dropper tool from my background photograph instead of the neutral grey that I might normally use for shadows.

I did consider toning down and blurring the background but decided I’d just stick the original so that the whole thing looked like a regular digital snapshot and didn’t look too stage managed.

I stuck with the old elder boughs growing alongside the allotment fence and I’m pleased with the sinewy anatomical look they give him.

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Jon Snow

Jon Snow

This week’s final one-hour live portrait-drawing session on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week was Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, painted in oils by Catherine MacDiarmid. As the camera kept cutting to her explaining the progress of the painting, she made it onto the top right hand corner of my page, above Portrait Artist presenter Joan Bakewell.

Jon explained the cunning plan behind his brightly-coloured tie: when he’s interviewing people they’re attracted to the tie, which distracts them from scrutinising his face too closely. It didn’t work on Catherine though, as she added a suggestion of the tie only towards the end of her 4-hour session with him. She explained that she invariably starts a portrait with the ‘golden triangle’ of eyebrows and nose. Once she’s established that she introduces the rest of the face but she’s content not to define the edges, she lets them move freely until she’s happy with them. The mouth, which she finds one of the most difficult features, is usually the last to go in.

Jon’s preference for colour was to extend to his shirt – he thought that he should wear blue – but Catherine requested white as she’s keen on reflected light, even adding a subtle dash of reflected colour of the tie below his chin.

Watercolour Border

I’ve redrawn this border from my Dalesman nature diary featuring the walk around the lake at Newmillerdam Country Park, near Wakefield. In the first version, I thought that the pen and ink was competing too much with the text. To soften it I’ve gone for:

  • soft B pencil instead of black ink
  • textured watercolour paper instead of smooth cartridge
  • loose brushwork, all with a no. 10 sable round, instead of trying to define what textures are
page layout

Russell Tovey

Russell Tovey

Thanks to Sky Arts, I got a chance to draw actor and one of this year’s Turner Prize judges, Russell Tovey, today in a one-hour session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I won’t be standing by the phone next week to find out if I’ve won the coveted title as I’ve already seen some of the competition, however some artists had an advantage as they took the chance to start 3 hours earlier as the live programme was preceded by a podcast session. One hour drawing from a screen was enough for me.

At first I thought that perhaps I’d do better if he just sat still instead of chatting to the artist painting his portrait but really that was the point of the session. I could have drawn from a photograph otherwise. The way his expression changed and the way the light changed made the session feel similar to drawing someone in real life.

Nature Poems

books and jug
Original 13cm x 13cm

It’s been a while since I drew anything just for the fun of it, so simply drawing the pile of books on the coffee table in pen appealed to me. That didn’t seem quite enough, so I added the small jug from the sideboard and brought a pen and pencil into the picture.

The book is Jane McMorland Hunter’s A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, which we’ve kept up to since our friend Jill bought me if for my birthday in April. This morning’s poem though had a touch of the supernatural about it: The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde.

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Fresco for iPhone

man in hat

My first drawing using Adobe Fresco for iPhone, drawn with a Wacom Bamboo stylus.

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