Members of Horbury’s Victoria Band were playing carols and Christmas songs at Di Bosco’s coffee & champagne bar on Thursday, which gave me a chance to try drawing them on my iPad Pro, using ProCreate.
The man on the right is playing a bass trombone but he ‘gets a lot of tenor notes out of it too’.
I like to set up pencil, wash and pen on separate layers but I found myself working on the wrong layer several times. For a drawing from life like this, I don’t think that matters, as I want the initial pencil to show through anyway, I don’t need to hide the pencil layer as I might in a more finished illustration.
The cat that is usually to be found lurking in the border by our bird feeders leaves its lair and sets off down our garden then makes its way through a gap in the hawthorn hedge. After all that waiting and watching, it’s ready for a work-out. It jumps onto next door’s trampoline and starts clawing around the entrance flap in the safety mesh. It evidently enjoys that, as it slinks in through the slit and indulges in another burst of claw-sharpening on the mesh from the inside.
Next it walks around the perimeter, then decides to attempt to climb up the netting on the far side. It almost gets to the top.
But that’s it for this session, it leaves by the entrance flap, jumps down and walks off down the garden path.
It’s time that I got back to adding watercolour to my drawings, real watercolour that is, not the virtual watercolour of my iPad drawings, so when we set off to Leeds I take a new A5 Bockingford 300 gsm sketchbook with me. My regular sketchbooks are often cartridge paper, which works fine for the light washes that I normally use but it’s a pleasure to use something with a bit more character. You might think that watercolour paper would be more absorbent than cartridge but this variety has a surface – probably a thin coating of size – which is slightly resistant to a wash. This isn’t a problem, I just need to have enough watercolour on my brush to cover the area that I’m working on.
My thanks to Cremede Art for letting me try a hand-finished sample of their sketchbooks.
We’ve just posted off all our Christmas cards, so far ahead of schedule that we deserve a coffee and a homemade lattice mince pie at Di Bosco’s. What a difference homemade mincemeat makes; plump raisins and sultanas soaked, we guess, in brandy with lemon and lime to give it a fresh hint of citrus.
I draw a few of the customers as they walk in from the car park. I’ve brought my Lamy Safari fountain pen with the B nib, which is the pen that I used to write the cards.
I enjoyed the opportunity to write sixty or seventy addresses as a way of trying to improve my handwriting. Inevitably, I started off feeling self-conscious about it, which makes me feel tense, which in turn brings out the shakiness in my hands.
I’d find that I was attempting to brace myself, keeping arms rigid and bending over so that my shoulders and back tensed up too but with so many envelopes to get through, I soon got into the rhythm of it and sat up in a straighter, more relaxed pose, my arms less constrained.
The rounded tip of the B nib makes it a pleasure to write with. Spikes, spluttering lines have their place but a flowing line is more relaxing to draw, or write.
New Layout
I’m experimenting with the latest version of WordPress, so if you’ve noticed a change in the layout of my blog, that’s the reason. I’ve got a lot to learn but the best way is to try things out.
Me tensing myself up as I attempt my best writing. Drawn on the iPad in Clip Studio Paint. Barbara says this doesn’t look like me at all, that’s a relief!
I probably wouldn’t choose to draw any of these building individually, but I enjoyed drawing the jumble of shapes of the Leeds city centre skyline as seen from Cafe Costa at the Crown Point Retail Park.
As I drew a single magpie was pecking between the slats of a ventilation grill at the side of the Mothercare building. Perhaps there were spiders or insects sheltering there.
Shoppers at Birstall on Thursday.
We’re waiting for Hobbycraft to open, a store that I don’t think I’ve ever visited before. At one time, I couldn’t have browsed around the extensive art section without buying a particular pen or sketchbook but I’m so happy with my TWSBI EcoT fountain pen that I’m not really on the look-out for the next best thing. I’ve still got a drawer in my plan chest and a shoe box in the attic stocked with new sketchbooks but my rate of getting through them has slowed since I became fascinated by drawing on the iPad.
Shoppers, Birstall, on Wednesday; we were there two days running, the first time to see the new Robin Hood film.
It’s good to alternate between iPad and sketchbook, to be reminded what a pleasure it is to make real inky lines on paper. There’s a feedback from the texture of cartridge paper that I’m never going to get from my Apple Pencil on the glassy surface of the iPad.
I’ve switched from hiking boots to these Clarks GoreTex trainers recently and I’ve noticed the difference; you flex your feet more in trainers. You might think that would put more pressure on the toes but its the calf muscles on the back of my legs that have been doing the extra work and which feel taut. On one occasion in the middle of the night I got a touch of cramp, so I’m making sure that I keep doing a bit of stretching.
I’ve drawn these in Procreate on the iPad and this time I’ve left the initial pencil drawing showing, which makes it more like a regular still life drawing as you get a hint of the process that went into it.
To make it less self-consciously an iPad drawing, I did consider doing the drawing all on one layer but I thought that the pen might run into the paint as I added it, which wasn’t the effect that I wanted, so it was drawn as normal, in three layers, as above, plus a background layer of white ‘paper’.
Testing different pen tools and brush tools in Procreate for iPad.
People on the precinct in Ossett were hurrying by in the cold, gloomy, afternoon rain, so I was grateful to be sketching them from the shelter of Bistro 42 after sampling a selection of tapas.
Passers-by were crossing my field of view so quickly that the only way to draw them was a to focus on an individual, take a mental photograph and then try to get the impression down on paper.
It makes a change for me to draw people. With natural history subjects, I’m keen to record enough visual information to identify a species of plant or animal but we’re all so familiar with humans as a species that the emphasis can instead be on trying to suggest character.
Pencil, Pen & Paint in Procreate
I drew in pen with no watercolour in my sketchbook but then redrew the figures on my new iPad Pro using a program suggested my comic artist friend John Welding. Procreate is more closely adapted to the possibilities of the iPad than Clip Studio Paint, the program that I’ve been using a lot recently, but I’ll keep coming back to Clip Studio because I like the page design tools that are incorporated into it.
I don’t normally draw in pencil because with the rough handling my sketchbooks get, pencil lines soon get smudged but I like the pencil tool in Procreate as a quick way for starting a drawing. There’s a tool for smudging it too, if you really want that.
Procreate gives the option to make a thirty-second movie of your drawing.
A mapping pen, as the name suggests, is designed to produce regular lines and the Clip Studio Paint version does a good job of emulating that, but without the danger of twisting and splaying its long, flexible nib, something I had to be careful to avoid when I used the real thing in my student days. I soon discovered that a dip pen with a Gillot 303 or 1950 nib was a better option for me.
The Clip Studio mapping pen tool gives a more consistent line than the G-pen which I’ve mainly used so far. The G-pen is designed to give the kind of varied, expressive line that is such of feature of comic strip art.
For once, as a change from drawing my hand, the subject I often revert to when I’m sitting in a waiting room, I drew my feet instead, resting on the arm of the sofa.
I wouldn’t try that in the waiting room.
Drawn in Clip Studio Paint with an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro, using the Mapping Pen tool and a Size 13 Transparent Watercolour Brush.
And having sorted out a pen that I like, here’s a final sketch in colour.
I tried all the watercolour brushes available in Clip Studio Paint and decided that ‘Transparent’ was the nearest to the watercolour washes I use in my sketchbooks.
We were at Meadowhall today, so I couldn’t resist calling in the Apple Store to try drawing on the new iPad Pro with the new Apple Pencil (the old Apple Pencil isn’t compatible with the new iPad).
It feels as if there’s no delay between the movement of the pencil and the line appearing: apparently they’ve got it down to just a few milliseconds. And they’ve also added a little bit of resistance, presumably to the tip of the pencil, to try to reduce the feeling that you’re drawing on glass.
In the very basic drawing program in Apple Notes, the colour I selected felt like using a large chisel-ended marker pen, but I think the sketches of passing shoppers that I made with the program’s virtual felt-tip pen produced results that would be difficult to distinguish from my efforts the real version of the pen.
Look forward to trying it out with Clip Studio Paint.
When we arrived home yesterday afternoon, we found a wood pigeon casualty on the back lawn, with a scattering of small downy feathers around it. A few moments later, Barbara spotted a bird of prey, probably a sparrowhawk, flying over the houses on the other side of the road, so perhaps we had disturbed it as we returned.
In a sparrowhawk kill, there should be marks on the quills where the sparrowhawk has grasped the feather with its bill. Most of the feathers were too flimsy for this to show but on two of the larger feathers there were traces of marks.
It’s not conclusive but I think that sparrowhawk is most likely. We’ve had a cat visiting the garden that lurks in the flower border then pounces on the birds that have gathered around the feeding pole. We’ve yet to see it catch a bird but two days ago it chased a grey squirrel up the crab apple.
The squirrel had to escape by leaping from the top branches into next door’s garden.
