Category: Drawing

Common Objects

watercolours

It’s good to have a new sketchbook and to have an aim in mind. Alongside my fantasy pen illustrations for the Mattias Adolfsson’s course, I also need to draw everyday objects, which will be my starting point for more imaginative drawings.

clinometer

Objects do have a character, a life of their own. This selection from my drawer includes a homemade clinometer, used to measure the angle of dip of strata, which dates back to when I was taking an A-level in geology, but didn’t have the funds to treat myself to the real thing. I bought a cheap plastic geometry set from the Eagle Press in Wakefield, stuck the protractor to an offcut of hardboard from an unfinished acrylic painting and added a plumb line made from a thread with a small nut attached. The larger compass-like instrument in the foreground is a map measurer. It’s so much easier to plan routes for walks in these days; I’m spoilt for choice for digital maps, the Ordnance Survey is my current favourite.

micro cassette

Despite all the advances in technology my Olympus Pearlcorder microcassette recorder still has its uses. Yesterday I recorded a list of plants as we walked along between the hedges of a sunken lane. It was a cool morning but I can operate the Pearlcorder even with my gloves on. In contrast, when I’m using my iPhone, which I love, as a camera I still occasionally brush against some peripheral icon and end up getting a screen with my Twitter feed and messages on it. The Pearlcorder has reassuringly chunky buttons.

brushes

When I left art college and set myself up in my first flat, I decided that anything that I bought – for instance a bread knife, a bowl or a bread knife – had to be practical but also drawable, which for me meant the sort of object you might see in a storybook. So instead of going for the latest shiny designer teapot with its chrome and pyrex, I would go for the traditional brown ceramic version. The veg brush on the right has my ideal combination practicality and drawability and it we bought it at what must surely be the most design-conscious retail outlet in the Peak District: the shop at the David Mellor cutlery factory at Hathersage. Look forward to visiting it again after the lockdown.

mugs

Crafts

embroidery
bag

Finally, here are a couple of Barbara’s lockdown craft creations: a tote bag using curtaining material from a bag of remnants from the much-missed Skopos in Batley and, a new venture for her, an embroidery based on some natural forms she’s been drawing recently.

Drawing Pens

Pens

As well as the fantasy pens, I’ve been adding to this A3 sheet of pen studies over the last week. The red fountain pen, the Osmiroid B2, is one that I probably haven’t used for decades but I found that I still had a cartridge that fitted it, so I cleaned it out and drew the Osmiroid ‘tipped medium soft’ with it to finish off the sheet.

And here’s the final sketchbook spread of my fantasy pens. I had a space bottom left to fill so I finished off with a Metamorphosis Pen (apologies for my spelling) and Big-Fish-Eat-Little-Fish Food Chain Pen.

I’m looking forward to Lesson 2 of my online illustration course. Luckily there’s no time limit on completing assignments.

Pots of Pens

pens

Our first assignment on Mattias Adolfsson’s the online illustration course The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art (see link below) that I’ve just started is to get our pens together. These are a small selection . . .

more pens

Next is to produce a sheet of observational drawings of some of those pens, trying out different techniques as we go. I’m still only halfway down my A3 page but the good news is that, with all those pots of pens, I won’t run out of subject matter.

satirical pens

I’ve already made a start on the next stage of the assignment, which is to take things one stage further and draw a sheet of fantasy pens. It doesn’t matter how silly the idea is.

Link

The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art
A course by Mattias Adolfsson, Illustrator

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Cuckoo Flower

sketching flowers

I’ve started a new sketchbook for an online illustration course (more of that later). We’re asked to sign our name on the first page and write the date . . .

flowers

The difficult ones first! I knew it was the 2nd.

I had an idea of how I’d like to draw the unfurling croziers of the male fern, growing by the pond. It didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, probably because I wasn’t close enough to take in the detail I’d intended to add.

But that’s an advantage of a sketchbook, as opposed to a commission, I can relax and move on to the next drawing. Really enjoyed drawing these.

Pen & Ink

pen and ink

Just half an hour with the Adobe podcast this lunchtime, so I stuck with pen and ink (Lamy Vista and Noodler’s) for my desktop drawing.

Kingcups

3.55 p.m., 10 C, 50 F, breezy from north-east

kingcups

A female smooth newt appears briefly at the sunny, shallow edge of the pond. A bear-like cat saunters across our veg garden but makes a speedy return when Poppy, next door’s little dog spots him.

From our hawthorn hedge, the jingling song of a dunnock. There’s a sprinkling of pale petals of crab apple blossom across the pond, closely followed by the paper napkin that I’ve been using to blot my water-brush on. Luckily the cord of my sun hat gets caught in the zip of my fleece as it blows off my head, otherwise that would have ended up in the pond too.

No wonder the female smooth newt disappeared into the pondweeds: soon after I return indoors, I see that the female blackbird from the nest in the corner of the hedge has caught a male newt. She shakes it repeatedly and I get glimpses of the male newts bright orange belly, speckled with dark spots like a butterfly’s wing.

Two hours later, I saw her back again at the end of the pond. She went down to the water’s edge and with a quick stab caught another male newt.

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Adobe Live: Radim Malinic

Radim

Today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session is with branding designer and former musician Radim Malinic. For my sketch, I decided to go back to pen – Lamy Safari – and ink – Noodler’s Black.

Radim

Someone asks where Radim gets his inspiration. Perhaps from galleries and museums? No, he answers, he doesn’t create art, that’s something different, so he observes how people behave in shops and cafes. How they buy things, how they carry bags. To me it sounds very similar to the way many artists gather material and inspiration, observing the everyday world rather than being preoccupied with reacting to art history and commenting on it, which you can’t get away from really, even if you do decide not to visit galleries.

Radim

He describes how he used the process of writing and designing his first book as a way of coming down to earth, becoming more mindful, after an intensive period of work. His three books, bursting with striking artwork, describe his personal design process.

Link

Radim Malinic’s Brand Nu website

Skokholm Island, Easter, 1970

Skokholm Island, 1980
Mad Bay, Skokholm Island, April 1980

My ‘pen & ink, bamboo pen, watercolour, a bit of gouache and a gull dropping’ drawing of Mad Bay, Skokholm Island, Pembrokeshire, dates from a week’s visit (extended by a day or two because of bad weather) in April 1980, but my first Skokholm adventure, ten years earlier, started, rather like a Sherlock Holmes story, with an urgent telegram:

telegram

I think that even today it would be difficult to arrive at Haverfordwest Railway Station at 6.15 a.m. and it proved impossible then. As it happened, the weekly boat to the island didn’t sail that day because of the weather.

Skokholm Sketchbook
diary

Here’s my sketchbook from that stay on the island. I picked up the rope on the shore and attached it to the spiral binding so that as I walked around the island stalking seals and puffins, I could scramble over the rocks with both hands free but be ready to take out my pen and bottle of ink to start work.

While I was up in the attic looking for this sketchbook, I came across my diary for 1970, which I probably haven’t dipped into since then. I’ve forgotten why I was writing my diary in a Spicer’s triplicate book. I remember my time on the island vividly, but it’s interesting to put it in the context of my everyday life as a student.

Holiday diary

On a boat trip to the neighbouring island of Skomer six years earlier, we’d called in at Skokholm on the return trip to pick up a small party of birdwatchers.

I-Spy Birds

That day trip to Skomer gave me some of the material for my entry in the Daily Mail I-Spy Birds competition, which coincided with the launch of the RSPB’s Young Ornithologists’ Club. I was a joint first prize winner and received not only a welcome postal order but also a red feather and a personal letter from Big Chief I-Spy himself.

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Live from the Sofa

During the corona virus lockdown, I’m missing out on drawing in coffee shops – which sometimes seems to be the main theme in my sketchbooks, so I tried drawing the hosts today’s Adobe Live session with Katy Cowan of creativeboom.com

Links

Behance: Adobe Live

Creative Boom

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A Pair of Ponies

ponies

I’ve enjoyed trying out the ‘Rough Wash’ brush in Clip Studio Paint’s ‘Realistic Watercolour’ section but, as Barbara commented, this is looking like something that you might see on a birthday card so, good-looking as these two guys are, this frame doesn’t express a gesture. There’s nothing to prompt readers to think ‘What happens next?’

comic strip

Much as I like the ponies we see on our regular walks, I need to develop their characters to tell a story. I don’t need the full cast, and, in order for them to interact, characters that are, in reality, in fields quarter of mile away from each other are going to have to be together. So sorry pinto pony, you’re going to be cut: it’s going to be the elegant chestnut and the dark brown Shetland in the grubby mac.

Here’s my rough for a more cartoony approach:

rough
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