Category: Art

Scaling up

desert island

With the village scene finished, this afternoon we swivelled around the eight flats that make up the backdrop and my helpers obliterated Robinson Crusoe’s desert island.

palace scene

This gave me chance to elaborate on yesterday’s rough of the palace. Taking a piece of cartridge of the same proportions as the backdrop, I divided it up into the eight rectangles of the individual flats then transferred the perspective from the rough, keeping it blocky so that I can scale it up onto the flats themselves.

The timber framework  of cross-members of the flats is just visible beneath the canvas, which gives me a handy horizontal grid, which I’ve indicated with pencil lines.

carpenter's pencil

I borrowed a carpenter’s pencil and began mapping out the whole thing on the flats themselves, starting on the right (stage left), the most critical area, and projecting the radiating perspective to the left. This will be a giant-sized paint by numbers for my team next weekend. They’ll soon have it blocked out in with the ‘W’, ‘Y’ and ‘B’ that I’ve indicated; white, yellow and a light pastel blue. If we can establish the structure we can then enjoy working up the details.

As I put it on Facebook this morning; ‘we’re aiming high today; for the Palace think Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, something that’s going to make Versailles look tatty. And we’ve got real gold paint, no, not the spray version, that’s a fire risk so we can’t use it on stage. Wouldn’t it be great to produce a set that when the curtains open the audience is stunned into a hushed ‘wow!’ Never happened yet but who knows, this year . . .’

The Palace of the Golden Egg

 

Mother Goose sketches

My first rough idea for the Palace of the Golden Egg in this year’s Pageant Players’ pantomime, Mother Goose, was to keep things simple and have three arches with pillars suggesting farmyard geese with a webfooted base and a beaky capital but I remembered reading somewhere that if you’re going draw a background at least go for an interesting perspective.

My next design shows the palace in perspective and this time, in addition to goosefoot bases, I’ve got egg-shaped windows and ormolu mirrors and a poached egg colour scheme of  yellow/gold and white, plus a pastel blue as a colour contrast to represent shading.Village scene

However, Wendy the producer tells me that we’re starting with the village scene today. Last year we were in Robinson Crusoe’s Rio to I’m obliterating its bougainvillea festooned taverna, shutters and pan-tiles with a Cotswolds barn inspired by the film of Into the Woods, a double-fronted half-timbered house and, as a contrast in shape, a thatched Georgian shop based on the Roundhouse on Queen Street, Horbury.

I painted the brown outlines but luckily I’ve got a team of young helpers waiting to help colour it in.

The Dark Side of Bananas

tomatoes, pepper and bananaI like to keep life simple and my sketches are usually line first, then colour. And that’s it. But here I wanted to indicate form too. I’m not good at multitasking so could I simplify the process to three discrete stages; line, form then colour? It didn’t quite work out.

Using the Tower Pen nib in the dip pen and brown Noodlers’ Ink, I drew the orange pepper first then added a tonal wash in paynes grey. Blue sits opposite orange on the colour wheel, so I guessed that a wash of orange over the greenish-blue Paynes grey would add form without throwing the colour off-key. The Paynes grey should theoretically work as an neutral shade. It’s not such a bad solution to the problem but the drawback is that I’ve lost the transparency of the orange. I’d like something more luminous.

For the tomatoes I remembered the advice of botanical illustrator Agathe Ravet-Haevermans; lightest colours first. The tomatoes started as an overall pale golden yellow, omitting only the highlight. The calyxes and stalks started as an ochre yellow. I prefer this approach because what I might lose in sculptural solidity is made up for in more luminosity. The white of the paper is still able to show through. A tonal under-drawing of Paynes grey would be more suitable for an architectural subject.

Bananas have long been problem for me. What colour is dark yellow? Again I started with an all over pale lemon yellow and instead of having neutral shadows I looked carefully to try and see the hints of green and sepia reflected in the yellow.

Just the kiwi-fruits left to draw now!

Sketchbooks to Go

small sketchbooksSnow aside, I’m starting to feel the urge to set out on adventures again, armed with a fresh travel sketchbook. As I’m always tempted when I see a different kind of sketchbook, I now have a drawer-full to choose from, ranging from one from Amsterdam which has handmade Thai paper to a waterproof notebook with its own graphite stick.

Industrial unit seen from Birstall Retail Park.
Industrial unit seen from Birstall Retail Park.

But my next travelling companion is going to have to be the Moleskine 8×5¼ inch sketchbook, which I bought from the 1893 Gallery shop in Salts Mill last summer and which I’ve been looking forward to getting started on ever since. I’ve never used a Moleskine sketchbook before and I’m guessing that it’s not going to be brilliant for watercolour but its advantage over my regular Pink Pig is that, lacking a spiral binding, it slots snugly into my A5 format art bag without getting snagged on the inner pockets or the zip fastening.

Only twelve pages to go in my Wainwright sketchbook, so it shouldn’t be too long before I can set off with my new ‘Legendary Notebook’.

Sketchbooks & Notebooks

Those sketchbooks and notebooks from the top to the bottom of the pile;

  • Sherlock Holmes Letterpress notebooks
  • waterproof notebook
  • two A6 landscape Pink Pigs
  • ECO Grey recycled leather Freewriters in A6 and A5
  • Moleskine Sketchbook
  • Yodels of Kendal watercolour spiral bound hardback
  • A5 Pink Pig
  • Olino ‘Karen Hill Tribe’ sketchbook with handmade paper from Thailand
  • Daler Rowney Lyndhurst High White 10 x 7 inch spiral bound pad.

Royal Baking Powder Pens

Royal Baking Powder tinpaper knifeIt was the tin that attracted me but we used the Royal Baking Powder years ago and it ended up, like the treacle and syrup tins that sit alongside it at the end of my bookshelves, as a pot for pens. I have an awful lot of pens. This little tin usually has a dowdy assortment of fibre tips in it but I’ve done the pen equivalent of flower arranging to make it more interesting for me to draw.

pens

Some of the pens are in need of refills but I’ve listed each working pen – using each pen – on the right. For the drawing itself I used a uni-ball gel grip, which, unlike them, doesn’t bleed through the absorbent paper of my current about town sketchbook (yep, still the Wainwright one, when will get to the end of it?).

The smooth-haired fox terrier paper knife was what my parents used in the 1950s and early 60s until they went for something more practical in steel.

Royal Baking Powder is made in Spain by United Biscuits Iberia S.L., Montornés del Vallés, Barcelona. It contains the raising agents disodium diphosphate and sodium bicarbonate, plus some maize starch.

All this talk of Barcelona and Baking Powder, makes me want to make a cake. How about the Nutty Magdalenas recipe from Sophie Ruggles My Barcelona Kitchen?

Links

David Lebovitz version of Sophie Ruggles’ Nutty Magdalenas recipe from his blog Living the Sweet Life in Paris

Sophie Ruggles tasting the good life in Barcelona

Desktop

desktopAfter a busy day it’s relaxing to sit down, listen to a few episodes of Plants; from Roots to Riches, and draw just for fun. I have a habit of clearing my desk prior to starting any project. Sometimes it makes a change to enjoy the accumulated clutter.

Of all the vintage pen nibs that I tried recently I didn’t come across a bad one for drawing. This was drawn with the last one I tried, the Tower Pen, and it’s as good as any. It’s a lot easier to draw without a camera fixed above my sketchbook!

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Tower Pen

I’m enjoying trying out these vintage nibs and this latest is as good as any I’ve tried so far – or am I getting more accustomed to drawing with a dip pen?

The Tower Pen No.11 was manufactured by F. Collins & Co Ltd, Prestwich, Manchester. I’m lucky to have box full each (144 nibs) of the gilt and bronze versions, in fact the bronze version is unopened. Enough nibs to last me a lifetime, provided I live to be 250 years old and draw every day!

I’d characterise this nib as being the most elegant I’ve tried so far, so I’d have to imagine Henry James writing with it rather than Bob Cratchit.

That bloomin’ booklouse makes another walk-on appearance! I blew him off the sketchbook but no doubt he or she will trundle across my sketchbook again the next time I’m filming.

Left Leg

left legWaiting around, I decided on a change from drawing my hand, or just my foot. Why not draw the leg that I’m resting my sketchbook on. For the second drawing I wanted to switch to my right leg crossed over but I discovered that I can’t cross my legs that way. I’m a left-handed leg-crosser.

The scale went awry in the second drawing when I reached my trainer and got involved in detail, enlarging my foot in relation to my leg in the process.

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Categorized as Drawing Tagged

The Royalty Pen

Royalty nib boxShapely and bronzed, this steel nib manufactured by I.D.Belcher & Co. of Birmingham is the kind of nib that Bob Cratchit might have used if he’d still been working for Scrooge in the late Victorian era.

It’s scratchy enough to offer a hint of  feedback from the surface of the paper and to give a sharp etched-looking line but even with that sharp point it flows well. royalty nibsIt might help that I was using the smoother flowing Noodler’s Ink instead of the Winsor & Newton Indian Ink that I used in previous tests. It occurred to me that the vintage nibs that I’ve been using probably weren’t designed for use with viscous Indian ink.

Royalty nib
I’m happier drawing real objects than copying someone else’s design. There’s such a pleasure in just making marks with dip pen and ink. You can see that I get into a flow when it comes to the scattered nibs, they’re more random and organic, like a bunch of ash keys or sycamore seeds, the sort of thing that I’d normally draw.

 

Outside the Box

The eagle-eyed amongst you might spot a small creature – a booklouse I guess – trundling along and heading down into the spiral binding of my sketchbook when I’m drawing the fourth or fifth nib outside the box. I’d spotted this little creature crawling amongst the nibs in the bottom of the box when I emptied out the contents. There’s a small ecosystem in there!

Drawing Close

My thanks as always to the people who made the music track available on YouTube. If it wasn’t for CouldB Entertainment making the track Drawing Close available, you’d have to listen to my scratchy pen and, if you drew close enough, the patter of the tiny feet of the booklouse.

Proscoptera – the booklice and barklice – have been around since the Permian period when the early dinosaurs first appeared in the fossil record.

Link; CouldB Entertainment

Rostrum Camera Lite

rostrumA gorilla pod attached to an old photographic enlarger stand was the best thing that I could devise to make my two YouTube videos of me drawing with vintage pen nibs. I intend to improve on this set up but at least I discovered that it works in principle.

I’d like to make a portable version, with a light framework attached to a drawing board, so that I can film my regular sketches on location, for instance at Old Moor bird reserve or at the farm park.