My first attempt at making a model after completing the basic tutorial in SketchUp.
Category: Art
SketchUp from first principles
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get through all your errands then, when you have a blank day, feel fresh and thoroughly inspired?
It doesn’t work like that for me. There’s plenty that I could do but nothing pressing so to celebrate the launch of a new version of SketchUp, the first in eighteen months, I’m dipping back into the program again. Mine isn’t the latest Pro version but the free version has plenty of possibilities.
Breathing Space
I could argue that as illustration involves depicting three-dimensional objects in two dimensions it makes sense to explore all the possibilities. Playful experiment can feed into my regular illustrations in surprising ways.
It’s probably much more to do with my fascination for making models and creating imaginary worlds. I feel that we should all be allowed to do some things just because we enjoy them.
I’ve been through these tutorials before but it’s several years ago, so it’s been worth going back to first principles.
In the fourth and final part of the SketchUp basics video tutorials in which you get to construct a hall table, you get to grapple with such subtleties as tapering the legs, mirror imaging two of them to create the other pair and, the final touch, getting the drawer handles spot in the middle of the drawer front. There’s a trick to it.
Link; SketchUp
Spring in my Step
In my determination to draw a page a day, which I’ve kept up since before Christmas, I’ve had to resort to working a lot from photographs taken on walks to fill in the gaps for particular days. What a refreshing change to have the time to get into the back garden for an hour or so to draw from life.
I feel as if I’ve got so much more freedom working from the real thing; freedom to be less literal with colour and detail. Because I’ve got a better understanding of what’s in front of my eyes I can be more playful in the way I draw it.
Whenever I go to a movie if there’s a 3D version that’s the performance that I’ll go for and it’s the same with drawing. I can relax and let the drawing flow more freely because in real life – HD, HDR and 3D as it is – I’ve got a better understanding of how things are arranged in space – for instance woodland seen through a hedge. That kind of thing can give you cause to stop and ponder when you’re working from a photograph, which breaks the flow a bit.
I’m convinced that I’ll be getting out more often as we move into spring.
My drawing might not be as resolved as the subject deserves. Perhaps if I’d had two hours I’d have gone for something more ambitious but any drawing is better than none. I look forward to having the time to go over the top with a drawing.
Robinson Crusoe and the Pirates
Wouldn’t it be great if I always had a team of young helpers ready to fill in the blanks when I had a big illustration to do? While the crew set up the eight flats that we use as the backdrop for our Pageant Player pantomimes I set about sketching out some ideas.
Robinson Crusoe & the Pirates starts in a village in some unspecified country in South America. We’ve never featured South America in one of our productions before and as I’ve never visited the continent I’ve got the nearest thing that I know in mind; Pollenca, Majorca. I add Rio’s Sugar Loaf mountain in the background, although Pollenca has some pretty impressive limestone crags of its own.
When they get the flats in place, I realise that I need to go for more of a letterbox, wide-screen format, cutting out the ground altogether.
I usually concoct this year’s scene from the basis of last year’s but this time I decide we ought to make a fresh start.
While my team of young helpers put a coat of white emulsion over last year’s Snow Queen village, I make a more accurate drawing to grid up onto the 11×4 ft flats, which have three cross-members – easily visible beneath the canvas – which I adopt as as my grid.
The swatches are a reference for Ken for mixing the emulsion paint.
My proportion goes awry as I get to the right hand side mapping things out and the village church ends up looking more like Barnsley town hall. No bad thing.
Back to the Sketchbook
It’s soon got around to Burns Night – one month since Christmas day already – and this is only my second post of the new year but I have been busy; for the last month I’ve managed a page a day in my holly green sketchbook. For that I’ve been trying something new by scanning the whole page each day.
I’ve also enjoyed sticking to just one theme, natural history, as it’s got me noticing things that I would have missed if I hadn’t set myself the task of finding something fresh, however trivial, to draw and write about each day.
New Theme
In contrast to the simplicity of that page a day approach I decided to go for a different look for this Wild Yorkshire blog, making it less of a drawing journal and more of a newsletter for my other projects, such as the somewhat neglected www.wildyorkshire.co.uk nature diary website and my even more neglected www.willowisland.co.uk, which includes my walks booklets, guide books and published sketchbooks.
I’ve decided to go for a new theme for the new year, one which makes navigation a bit more obvious, rather than relegating it to the bottom of a long page. The latest WordPress standard theme, called 2014, seemed a good one to go for.
Update
25 February; As the 2014 looked a bit black and formal, I’m now trying an airier theme called Mon Cahier, which still includes a column for navigation, hopefully combining what I like about Aldus with the functionality of WordPress 2014.
The Holly Green Sketchbook
A NEW SKETCHBOOK and, as I started it over Christmas, I had to go for the one with the holly green cover.
Rather than fit it into this regular blog, I’ve given it it’s own website and the new format, putting the emphasis on the sketchbook page itself, has worked well for me, encouraging me to complete a page a day.
One A5 page a day might not seem like much of a commitment but believe me with the distractions of Christmas that’s been quite a challenge.
I’ve also decided to give the sketchbook a theme – natural history – and I think this helps to give me some focus when deciding what to draw. I’m also making efforts to tell little stories rather than always to immerse myself in the drawing.
Pages so far include;
Leaf prints, hunter’s marsh, spear thistle, canal bridge, pheasant feeding, cherry galls, holly & ivy and Tuscan black cabbage.
Colour Profile
IT SEEMS such a simple thing to do a drawing, scan it same size and print it in a book but mysterious things happen in the process – such as a bright blue line suddenly turning to indigo as it goes from screen to paper.
I’m reading Louis Benjamin’s Photoshop CS5 in Simple Steps to get to know more about the process. But reading isn’t enough for me, I need to go through some of the processes to take them on board but then, if I don’t happen to need to use a particular technique for a while, it can slip from my mind.
Online Notebook
I’ve tried making notes as I go but they end up on scraps of paper or in various notebooks so today I’ve started an online notebook.
I won’t need to go rootling through a draw to refresh my memory. My experiments and notes will be beautifully organised in a mini-website. Well that’s the theory.
Link: Colour Profiles, my experiments in Photoshop.
Coca Cola
I’VE BEEN getting a new edition of Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle off to the printers today. I checked out all the routes and was delighted that there was hardly anything that needed changing and all those changes were for the better, for example some of the wobbly old stiles had been replaced by new metal kissing gates.
But I thought the new building – I think it’s the distribution centre – at the Coca Cola Enterprises site at Lawns village, Wakefield, should go in, so I redrew that corner of my picture map and managed to included a few facts about this ‘largest soft drinks plant by volume in Europe’.
From miles away it can look surprisingly conspicuous but strangely when you get nearer to on those leafy footpaths it often disappears altogether.
It sits pretty much in the centre of the Rhubarb Triangle, but as far as I know it doesn’t manufacture a rhubarb beverage. Dandelion & burdock perhaps but I can’t think of a rhubarb drink that they might try. Rabarbaro Zucca, an Italian aperitif, is alcoholic.
Link; Coca Cola, Wakefield
Finishing off
HAVING GOT to the end of one sketchbook with a short burst of drawing on reserves and in the farm park, I thought now would be a good time to set about bringing my other current sketchbooks to a close so that I can make a fresh start in the new year.
In compiling my Wild Yorkshire nature diary articles for the Dalesman magazine, I’ve realised how useful it is to have a straightforward chronological run of sketchbooks if you ever want to retrieve a particular drawing for later publication.
If you’re doing what I’ve been doing for the last year, keeping five sketchbooks in assorted sizes going at once, six if you include the large format sketchbook that I keep for book illustration in the studio, it gets very difficult to search for a drawing made on a particular date.
Perhaps I’ll rationalise this a bit in the new year and concentrate on a particular size.
Square versus Landscape
The A5 landscape Pink Pig spiral bound sketchbook that I’ve just completed seems a good compromise between portability and page size, but the 8 inch square of A5 format that I used at the weekend proved good for wildlife as there’s more space on a deeper page to add quick notes.
I find that anything that I write on location – about colour, incident or atmosphere, for example – is more precise than my later memories. But I’m reluctant to write when I’m out there because I love to spend as much time as I can drawing.
Wainwright Sketchbook
All these sketches are from an A5 sketchbook that fits neatly in the little grey bag that goes with me on everyday errands. The spiral binding on a regular A5 sketchbook won’t quite squeeze in.
Great binding, shame about the paper; fountain pen ink goes straight through it, watercolour soaks in instantly but blotchily.
I might try crayons until I finish the book but it’s a shame that it’s not more sympathetic for fountain pen drawing because when I’m grabbing the odd moment to draw it flows better than any fibre tip.
Walton Hall Watercolour Workshop
A GEORGIAN country house on an island in a lake surrounded by parkland, Walton Hall, near Wakefield, is a great location for a watercolour workshop and we’re glad of the comfortable shelter the cafe offers as it rains heavily all morning.
I was asked to lead the workshop last month as part of the Walton Arts Festival.
Swatches
A beginner has brought along a brand new box of watercolours but doesn’t know where to start.
With any new set of watercolours I like to paint a page of swatches. This helps me familiarise myself with the layout of the box and gives me practice in mixing the range of colours included. It’s useful practice for painting smooth, graduated washes, the basis of watercolour technique.
Some colours behave better than others when it comes to giving a smooth transition. I have several ‘wash backs’ where a colour runs back into the previous wash. Earthy colours such as yellow ochre have a tendency to go a bit spotty. But if you want perfection you might as well add the colour in Photoshop. These limitations are part of the medium, so you need to use watercolours enough to feel comfortable with them.
As usual when I’m working with beginners, I find myself encouraging students to add a bit more water to their washes. I can see the attraction of plastering on the pigment with such 
gorgeous colours on offer but the luminosity of watercolour comes from letting the white of the paper show through a transparent or semi-transparent wash, giving a sense of light and atmosphere which wouldn’t be quite the same in oils or acrylics.
Thumbnail Layouts
The rain eased off a little after lunch and we found shelter from a cool wind under the back porch. I often feel that I learn as much from the students as they do from me and today it was a request for a session on pencil and watercolour that prompted me to have a change from my habitual pen and watercolour.
The panorama of lake, woods and hillside, not to mention a foreground of flowerbeds, urns, chairs and tables gives us a little bit too much in the way of subject matter. I explain that one way to tackle an overcomplicated scene like this is to draw a two-minute matchbox-sized thumbnail of your composition, rather than simply start in one corner (as I admit I often do) and commit to a full-size two hour sketch from the start.
Working with a soft 4B pencil on the cartridge paper of my sketchbook gives a tonal effect. Adding a simple watercolour wash gives an instant impression of how the finished drawing might turn out.
I like this quick method so much that I try a second thumbnail, this time in letterbox format (top of page). It’s just as well that I am working quickly because even in this sheltered spot after an hour we’re getting chilled through and it’s time to adjourn to the cafe, take a look at the day’s sketches and discuss what we’ve learnt and how we might take that further.
Taster Session
A good place to finish and it was a good place to start too. The first task that I set when we started this morning was to draw a scone . . . then eat it. A chance to briefly introduce the basics of drawing and adding watercolour without the challenge of changing light, shimmering water and masses of foliage that we’d be face when we turned to the view from the Hall.
Link; Walton Hall & the Waterton Park Hotel.