Category: Art

Cataloging Sketchbooks

sketchbooksSometimes I can spend so long looking for a particular drawing amongst the stacks of my sketchbooks in the attic that I realise it’s going to be quicker to redraw it.

For the past two years I’ve been writing my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for The Dalesman magazine and, a couple of weeks ago working against the clock to get my November article off, I found that even a couple of sketches from November last year had gone astray.

They’re there somewhere but I use so many different sized sketchbooks simultaneously that I couldn’t track it down.

I decided that it was about time that I settled down to cataloging my sketchbooks, so that I can use them as a picture archive. Thanks to my long-running online nature diary come drawing journal I can usually track down the date that I drew a particular drawing so I’m writing a start and a finish date on a sticky label for each sketchbook and then writing a few words to indicate content.

If I line up each size of sketchbook on the shelves in date order, it shouldn’t take too long to track down any sketch even if I can’t remember what size book I drew it in. If I can work out how to do it, I’ll enter each sketchbook on a database as well.

‘Do you mind if I draw you?’

Daler sketchbook 1979It’s fascinating going right back with my sketchbooks. For instance, this Daler A5 portrait format hardback from spring 1979  when I was starting on my Britain sketchbook for Collins features ‘People, buses, zoo and Hathersage’.

Amongst those sketches is an attractive young woman who I met in a pub when I asked if she’d mind if I drew her.

I still see her a lot today as we got married four years later!

 

Can an Artist have Shaky Hands?

handshakyhand1‘Who says an artist needs to have a steady hand? ‘ is the question posed by a current television advertisement for the Mazda3 which goes onto suggest that you need to do a bit of creative thinking to overcome the challenges that you meet in automotive design and in your limitations when drawing.

Phil Hansen, the featured artist, blames years of intense work on pointillist drawings for nerve damage that has forced him to look for other ways of making art.

Essential Tremor

handLast time I saw my doctor, I asked him about it. I remember having had shaky hands since the age of seven.

‘Does it go off if you have a glass of wine?’ he asks.

‘How did you know?! It’s worse when I’m tired or when  I’m upset about something. For instance I was at a party the other week and had to hold my champagne glass close to me because I was worried that someone was going to want to shake my hand. I can’t manage a cup and saucer. I was wondering if you could give me some advice on it as a medical problem.’

‘Let’s not call it a medical problem,’ he suggests, ‘it’s a human condition; everyone’s hands shake to some extent.’

He diagnoses it as essential familial tremor. There’s no cure for it as such but if it gets worse (I can move on to affect the neck, voice or even legs) I could try beta-blockers. I think I’d rather stick with red wine for now.

‘There’s a hypnotherapist just opened above our hairdressers, might that help?’

His sceptical smile says it all but he admits; ‘I would have dismissed it altogether until last week when we were given a demonstration and I was quite impressed.’

It’s good to know that I’ve got the option of a back-up, either for specific events that I might be worried about, or if it gets worse as a regular thing but for the moment I’ll try not to get so stressed or so tired and to try and relax and enjoy life.

Like my colour blindness, I think my shaky hands have given me a challenge to spur me on in my artwork.

Link; Phil Hansen, Mazda commercial

Coffee Stop

treeBlacker Hall FarmThe social whirl is fine but it will be good to settle down to work again and have more joined up time for drawing!

Today it was coffee at Blacker Hall Farm Shop, in a lofty beamed barn with a rural view (left) which in fact includes the embankment of the Barnsley to Wakefield Kirkgate railway.

beamThe tree was a quick lunchtime sketch sitting outside at the Cafe Capri, Horbury High Street but that’s just a break before the real business of the day which is to print some of my walks booklets for a stall at this weekend’s Festival in a Day event in Ossett.

Better get printing then . . .

Little Sketches

crematorium It was nice to get together with the family today but that didn’t mean that I had entirely go without sketching. I kept my mini-Moleskine notebook in my shirt pocket and my wallet of chunky crayons in my jeans pocket.

cruetteI try my best not to resort to drawing the cruet as we wait for our meal but I don’t want to intrude on the gathering by drawing family.

I really would like to draw people but I’d much rather do it at some public event or in a public place like a market.

leaf

The leaves are falling and I’m looking forward to focussing on natural history again before too long.

Enough of cruets!

Published
Categorized as Drawing

The Pheasants are Revolting

A couple of years ago, I drew a rough of this for one of the exercises in Drawing Words and Writing Pictures and, as I’m using it in an article, I’ve enjoyed working on a final version.

pheasant comic strip

 I traced my rough (below) in pencil onto layout paper, then scanned and added the colour in Photoshop.

I’m reading Teamwork Means that You Can’t Pick the Side That’s Right, one of Scott Adams’ Dilbert books and decided that I’d try graded backgrounds like he does, fading gradually from dark  to light.

Hope that I’ll get the chance to try some more comic strips but I’ve got a lot lined up for the autumn.
pheasant cartoonThe squirrel went from being demented in the rough to looking evil in the final version, which is a shame because that might suggest that he deliberately dropped the coconut shell. I was aiming at making him manically determined rather than evil.

Link; ‘The Pheasants are Revolting’ rough version, October 2012.

Pen and Crayon

goldfishfish headIt’s a shame that I broke a tooth but at least it gives me chance to take a close look at the goldfish in the tank in the dentist’s waiting room. I notice that each goldfish has a small, stiffish looking flap in front of each of its eyes, perhaps adding some protection or alternatively helping to stabilise the head as it moves through the water.

gablescupvinegarSince I discovered a pen that doesn’t bleed straight through the paper in my urban sketchbook I’ve been more tempted to draw in the odd vacant moment.

An ArtPen tin filled with a dozen Derwent Watercolour crayons replaces the watercolour box that I’d prefer to use, if the paper was up to it.

handThe colours were those included in a plastic pod (which didn’t stand up to being squeezed into my bag) so they’re not exactly the ones that I would have selected for the kind of subjects that I draw – there’s no grey for instance – but I feel that any attempt to indicate colour, however wide of the mark, records information that I couldn’t otherwise include and adds a bit of warmth to the starkness of pen and ink. 

How to be an Illustrator

How to be an IllustratorHere’s the book that I wish I could have read forty years ago but which is equally welcome now as a way of reassessing the way I work.

Darrel Rees, an illustrator turned agent, looks at the nuts and bolts of the business with plenty of solid advice on invoices, contracts and agents but he brings his story to life with glimpses of his own ups and downs and through a series of short interviews with illustrators and art directors.

I recognise so much of myself in it; the contrast between college and career; the mistakes you’re likely to make when you put together your first portfolio and the pros and cons of working from home. At several points Rees urges illustrators to try and see their work from the other person’s point of view.

I’m making it sound as if the book is a series of warnings, and you probably also get that impression from the sober cover featuring Brett Ryder’s illustration of sininster pencil-head men in white coats, but, with examples of work from a mixed bunch of illustrators, it’s also a celebration of a way of life that is, in the words of one of them, Michael Gillette, ‘terrifying at times, extremely liberating at others’ and, for Jeffery Decoster a ‘constantly surprising’ spur to ‘the creative process and personal growth’.

How to be an Illustrator second editionLinks; Laurence King, publishers of How to be an Illustrator (2008), which is now available in a second edition . . . with a less scary cover.

Darrel Rees’ Heart Agency

Purple Loosestrife

purple loosestrifeThe purple loosestrife is now at its best at the RSPB Old Moor reserve.

Two photographers in search of dragonflies apologise for trawling across my field of view, requesting that I don’t include them in the picture.

A shame, they would have added some scale. The loosestrife is shoulder high.

jointed rushJointed Rush

I think of rushes as being like the hard rush and soft rush; spiky and cylindrical, like a clump of green porcupine quills, but this is a rush too; jointed rush, Juncus articulatus, gets its name because the hollow stem is divided by internal ‘joints’.

It has clusters of star-shaped brown flowers which develop into egg-shaped fruits.

 

seedheadYellow Rattle

This dry seedhead was growing on a grassy path edge. It reminds me of bluebell but we’re not in woodland – or old hedgerows – here and when I check it out in the book I’m able to confirm that it’s yellow rattle, Rhinanthus minor, which is semi-parasitic on the roots of grasses.

It is a  member of the figwort family, Scrophulariaceae.

Each rounded capsule has a short beak at its tip. As it rattles in a breeze it distributes its winged seeds.

Bands of Blue and Green

pondI felt that I was getting a bit fussy as I painted the loosestrife so I went for a simpler approach with this nearby pond. With the quickest of pencil outlines I went straight on to the rapidly changing sky and its matching reflection, followed by bands of the lightest greens in each area to indicate distant trees, meadow, reedbed and reedbed reflections, plus the nearest willows.

With every bit of paper assigned a tone I could them add mid-tones of foliage and finally the darkest patches, adding a few of the brown branches of the willows.

Five Minute Sketch

sketchDuring the working week, my friend Helen Thomas has been busily painting forty small paintings during a strict forty hour period for her 8 x 5 project so I thought that before I settled down to catching up on my website this morning I’d start with a strictly five minute sketch.

The wood and meadow really do look as blurry as this through my sloping studio window as the depression labelled ex-Bertha progresses north-eastwards across the British Isles. We had to cancel a Wakefield Naturalists’ field meeting at Adel Dam when we heard that the Met Office had issued a yellow alert for today.

Colours used; yellow ochre and Winsor lemon in an initial all-over wash, then also French ultramarine, permanent rose, permanent sap green and neutral tint. No drawing in pencil first – there wasn’t time for that!

Link; Five by Eight, Helen Thomas’s Facebook gallery page.

Ten Minute Goose

Canada gooseThe Thornes Park Canada geese are used to passing dogs but still a bit wary of them, timing their morning traipse from the duck pond to the adjacent football field until there’s a break between dog-walkers.

‘Come away!’ says one dog-walker, ‘not everybody likes dogs!’

Well, you’d have to be very anti-dog not to like this quiet, wide-eyed, little white terrier – looking freshly shampooed and as if it’s going to a fancy dress party as one of Bo-Peep’s little lambs. It doesn’t want to walk past without pausing to check what I’m up to. Not to fuss me, or to yap but just to take in what I’m up to as I sit on the park bench.

I assure Ms Bo-Peep that it depends on the dog and, to be honest, I would have done a quick sketch of it if I’d had time but it does illustrate why I find that I can be more productive heading for Old Moor bird reserve for the day. I can sit amongst the herbage and get absorbed in my work.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like breaking off to chat to passers-by but there are only so many hours in a day for drawing.

I was ten minutes early for an appointment and driving past the park and thought why not have a ten minute break at the duck pond rather than arriving early. So, I’ve only spent a single minute of my precious time chatting but scale that out across a day and I could happily while way 10 percent of the time available!