ONE OF THE reasons that babies and toddlers appear from time to time in my sketchbook is that they’re not aware that I’m drawing them, so I can sketch away without feeling that I’m being obtrusive.
It’s my mum’s birthday today so the family have gathered from as far afield as Edinburgh, Sheffield, Hull and the flat upstairs.
As we leave, we stop to say hello to that other new member of the family, Frank the Springer Spaniel. As I’m kneeling down to make a fuss of him, I’m aware of patches of white in the periphery of my vision and I start half-thinking ‘I’m surprised that there are still a few patches of snow about’. But of course it isn’t snow, it’s snowdrops, which are at their best growing in drifts alongside the back lawn at my mum’s.
I’M ON A LEARNING CURVE so here, after a whole morning’s work, is the finished result of the tutorial on Drawing and Illustration in Photoshop that I started yesterday evening.
My colours look alarmingly computer generated but I should point out that Daniel Fieske’s version in the step-by-step example ends up looking more like an Arthur Rackham watercolour. I should improve with experience but the point is that I’ve been able to see every stage of the process – there’s no ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’ in the tutorial; you get to see every mossy rock drawn individually – and hopefully I’ll remember a lot of the useful Photoshop tips on alpha channels, selections, layers, blend modes and shortcuts and the time-saving ways that you can conjure them up without putting down the stylus of your pen tablet.
Fieske’s thoughts on tonal values, composition and keeping a hand-drawn quality can apply equally to artwork made with natural media so I hope that following his work process in such detail will feed back into my own work.
Links: Daniel Fieske’s The Wormworld Saga includes links to video tutorials on how he created the artwork.
The tutorial that I’m following is on a DVD supplied with the Intuos 4 pen tablet, Meet the Masters by video@brain
THIS KIND of Sketch Pad is unfamiliar to me; it’s the virtual Corel Painter version, Sketch Pad 4, which was available as a free download when I registered my Intuos 4 wireless pen tablet. Having worked out how to pair the tablet with my computer via a Bluetooth connection, this is my first attempt to draw with it wirelessly.
Thanks to Bluetooth, I can now rest the tablet on my knees but relating the angle of my pen strokes to the angle that will appear on the screen is going to take a bit of practice.
Some users report being able to work as far as 50 feet from the computer, so I could take the tablet down the garden. It would be interesting to see whether the resulting drawing bore any resemblance to reality. It would be like the blind drawing exercise in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
This sketch of Netherton Hall, a little to the right of the pylon in my view across Coxley Valley was made using the tablet in Autobook Sketchbook Express. It shows how far I have to go until the techniques become second nature. Choosing colours from the various on-screen palettes and slider controls is an awkward process compared with mixing watercolours from the pocket box of Winsor and Newton’s that I use daily.
Whatever brush tool I select in SketchBook Express my lettering turns out wobbly when I'm using the pen tablet.
AFTER ALL that work putting up shelves, assembling my new desk and designing a new plan chest/worktop, I can now put the finishing touches to my studio. My old graphics pad, a Wacom Volito, won’t work with my new computer so I’ve gone for the Intuos 4 wireless pen tablet.
What better way to test it out than trying it out in Sketchbook Express, which has been described as a Mac equivalent to Microsoft Paint, available as a free download. I used pencil, fibre tip, chisel tip pen and brush tools in this drawing.
It’s a strange experience to be drawing on the pad on my desk but reacting to the marks appearing on the monitor in front of me. It’s easy to draw a line at slightly the wrong angle.
One advantage is that for a change I don’t have to show my left hand holding a sketchbook.
Like the Volito, the main use for this Intuos tablet is likely to be for preparing scans of my drawings for print. It’s difficult to draw with a mouse and it can be a bit fiddly even to select shapes or erase with it. The Intuos is about as near as I’m going to get to being able to draw on screen without going to the enormous expense of a touch screen.
I’m happy to revert to ArtPen and watercolours as we drink our coffee after a meal at the Bar Biccari.
I’VE DRAWN this subject before; a batch of my walks booklets – the black and white ones that I print here in the studio – stapled and folded and left between clamps overnight so that they’re crisply folded. But this batch is a bit of a milestone because, except for a handful of odd copies hastily printed to fulfil orders, these are the first that I’ve produced in the my newly reorganised studio.
It felt good to at last stand collating and stapling them at my new birch ply worktop, a unit that incorporates a couple of Ikea A2 drawer units. The set up works really well.
The studio has been my major project since the launch of Wakefield Words in November but, three months after I first made my plans, using cardboard cut-outs, it’s at last being used for its intended purpose of writing, illustrating, designing and in a few cases printing and binding books and booklets.
The drawing is in dip pen with a century old (approx.) ‘John Heath’s Telephone Pen’ nib in Winsor & Newton black Indian ink (fourth drawer down, righthand drawer unit).
Meanwhile, long ago in a distant galaxy . . .
Daz 3D are now offering the latest version of Bryce (7.1) as a free download. It seems to work fine, although, having not used my previous version of it for several months, I’m a little disorientated when I use the controls. I’m sure that I’m going to find a good use for it one day.
DESIGNING SCENERY can be a relaxingly imaginative form of drawing, especially if you can give yourself enough time to sketch out your ideas, as I can this morning as a couple young recruits to our dramatic society roller over the previous backdrop. Sketching out my ideas is a pleasing combination of the imaginative and the practical because, although I’m not obliged to be historically correct or architecturally sound, I am constrained by the size of the backdrop (six 11 x 4ft flats) and by the requirements of the script.
This first sketch, in brown ArtPen on light brown sugar paper (absorbent ‘craft paper’ used in schools) shows the backdrop in proportion to the rest of the stage. The tabs, or wings, are black drapes.
Beauty, the Beast . . . and the Pantomime Dame
I’m designing the chateau of the Beast for Beauty and the Beast but this is a pantomime version, not to be confused with the 1740 original by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve or with the Disney version. No, this is the panto version so the action is regularly interrupted by the Pantomime Dame swaggering on and engaging the audience in cheeky banter. What more could you ask from an evening’s entertainment? A few tickets are still available. And – you’re going to like this – there’s a slapstick hairdressing scene. But I think that I can understand why Villeneuve didn’t burden her magical morality tale with a scene in the salon.
So the chateau is a bit of a neglected, slightly spooky ancestral pile but, on the other hand, the Prince/Beast isn’t without a bob or two (note: bob = one shilling in old money). So those repetitive, gloomy arches aren’t quite what we need.
From Donjon to Chateau
How about this? Make the central arch larger, to add a focal point and a bit of drama, and, as this is a chateau not a donjon, a Versailles-style door, as if the Prince’s ancestors renovated their medieval castle keep in the 17th or 18th century.
The entrance to the chateau is seen first through rusty gates, centre stage, with the black side-curtains drawn to reveal only the middle third of the backdrop. Later this same backdrop has to serve as the banqueting hall inside the chateau, so, if you’re following me, this has to represent the exterior and interior of the chateau.
The structures at either end were intended to suggest towers when seen from the outside (only they’re not seen, because they’re hidden by the half-drawn side-curtains) and elephantine pillars of the great hall when seen as an interior but as the Beast’s magic mirror stands in the corner stage left (house right) we left them out of the final version.
From Sketch to Backdrop
While inconsistencies in a pen sketch add to the animation and character of a drawing, I can’t ever seem to translate that spontaneity to the full-size backdrop, drawn in black emulsion paint with a half-inch filbert brush. A good example is the fleur-de-lys shields on the pillars, a motif that I’ve taken from the gates that have been made, which also suggest the French connection. In my drawing I don’t want them to be precisely identical but when they’re painted and coloured on the backdrop it looks as if someone just got it wrong and failed to draw each to identical proportions.
Sketching out the ideas is definitely more relaxing than putting them into practice.
I FEEL AS IF I’m being a bit intrusive if I start drawing people in a social situation. If I’m drawing people, I’d rather be in a public place; sitting in a cafe perhaps or at a street market. So as we talked after the meal this evening I found myself drawing corners of the room instead of assembled relatives from as far afield as Paris and Wath-on-Dearne.
THIS IS just the relaxed kind of drawing which I like to use my fine-nibbed ArtPen for. Adding colour, even the subdued colour of old brick and stone and grey winter skies, adds another dimension and more information, and helps to establish mood and atmosphere.
The views are disjointed because I was limited to drawing the details that I could see through the gaps in the vertical blinds at Barbara’s brother John’s when we called to see him and Margaret this morning.
I ADDED most of the colour later to these sketches from an afternoon’s return journey to Leeds from Dewsbury. The bolder line from the fine-nibbed ArtPen works well for drawing on the train or on station platforms.
3.30 pm; THREE Long-tailed Tits join the Goldfinches, House Sparrows, Bullfinch, Greenfinch, Chaffinch, Great Tit and Blue Tit already at or around the bird feeders. While most of the other birds are going for the sunflower hearts in the feeders or spilt below, the Long-tails go for the fat-balls.
A Wood Pigeon lands on the ivy in front of our next-door neighbour's. The ivy berries, now ripe, are probably the attraction.
Great Tits, Blue Tits and sparrows will also go for the fat-balls but we don’t recall seeing any of the finches feeding on them.
We’ve given up on putting out peanuts. They get left whenever sunflower hearts are available and they soon go soft.
The downside to this is that peanuts – especially red bags of peanuts – are particularly attractive to Siskins and, so far, we haven’t seen this small finch at the feeders this winter.
New Sketchbook
So far I’ve been saving my lime green A5 landscape format Pink Pig sketchbook for natural history subjects; I managed to draw 14 pages last year between mid-May and the beginning of August before events took over and I had to be content with a few snatched moments of natural history in my regular sketchbook.
That regular sketchbook, a black A5 portrait format sketchbook with soft, bleed-through cartridge paper that I’ve never cared for, is now complete and the drawing of the lime green sketchbook (above) is the last that I’ve got room for.
I’m now going to use the green for my everyday sketches but, of course, I’m hoping that on most days that will involve natural history.
Chimney drawn from the optician's waiting room last month.
The little black book contains so many waiting room sketches – I take my mum to about 50 appointments through the year, and then there’s our regular visits to dentists etc on top of that – so the lesson that I can learn is always to carry some ‘natural form’ object with me, for those inevitable unplanned periods where I have to wait a little longer than expected; a pebble, a leaf, a fossil or a feather for instance.
The most popular waiting room subjects in the little black book were architectural details (11), chairs (7), hands (4), trees seen through the window (3), piles of magazines (2) and my shoe and the reception desk at the doctors (1 of each). There are also three sets of sketches of the goldfish in the dentist’s.
Café Rouge
Here are the last couple of sketches drawn on location in the black book this lunch time at Café Rouge in Meadowhall between my first one-to-one session learning a bit more about my new computer at the Apple store and heading off to Orgreave with a consignment for our book suppliers.
You might be thinking whatever happened to our ideal of getting back to healthy eating, well, apparently the grilled chicken with roast vegetables and bulgar wheat amounts to just 600 calories.
How many calories the chocolate and banana crepe contained we didn’t trouble ourselves to find out.
ONE OF THE reasons that babies and toddlers appear from time to time in my sketchbook is that they’re not aware that I’m drawing them, so I can sketch away without feeling that I’m being obtrusive.
As we leave, we stop to say hello to that other new member of the family, Frank the Springer Spaniel. As I’m kneeling down to make a fuss of him, I’m aware of patches of white in 
the periphery of my vision and I start half-thinking ‘I’m surprised that there are still a few patches of snow about’. But of course it isn’t snow, it’s snowdrops, which are at their best growing in drifts alongside the back lawn at my mum’s.
I ADDED most of the colour later to these sketches from an afternoon’s return journey to Leeds from Dewsbury. The bolder line from the fine-nibbed ArtPen works well for drawing on the train or on station platforms.
