Category: Art

Sketch Pad

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.

Beauty and the Beast

WAS MY scenery, painted as flat colours with outlines picked out in black, too cartoony?

It’s good to come to a performance to remind myself what all that effort was actually for. The cast, which includes a number of younger new faces backed up by some of our regulars, give their all and there are some confident performers and singers amongst them. The humour is what you’d expect from a pantomime so the cartoon backdrops work fine.

When we first enter the Beast’s Castle, via a clever scene change that involves tab curtains being opened as old cobwebby gates fly open, I think for a moment should I have gone for something more distressed and gothick but the scene soon moves to melodrama, humour and children dancing so the suggestion of a baronial hall is about right.

Coming to a performance gives me an opportunity to draw, even if it is in the dark on the back row, other than that all I had time to draw today was my left foot.

Pen Tablet

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.

The Village Scene

AFTER LAST weekend when making it up as we went along meant one or two false starts in painting the castle backdrop, I had intended to prepare a colour sketch before we started work this morning. Typically, other things intervened throughout the week so here I am looking at the scene we’re painting over from last year’s production of Treasure Island wondering how I can convert the interior of the Admiral Benbow tavern into the opening village scene of this year’s pantomime.

The fireplace and chimney of the tavern become the well (drinking fountain in the shape of the head of a lion, this is Beauty and the Beast) and the chimney of the village bakery, while the view of the bay seen through the window of the tavern becomes the bakery’s window, piled high with baskets of baguettes and croissants.

But a boulangerie without a door doesn’t make sense and the only place to put it is in a little two-storey block replacing the chimney, dispensing with the drinking fountain.

I want to retain the view of a distant forest, glimpsed through a row of poplars at the edge of the village, because the next scene takes us to an enchanted forest (which doesn’t require a backdrop!).

Book Clamp

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.

Link: Daz 3D

The Chateau of the Beast

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.

Puppet Warp

I’M LOOKING forward to spring and being able to get out drawing wild flowers again but I can get a bit of practice by drawing cut flowers from the florists. The iris appealed to me more than the carnations and daisy-like flowers in the same bouquet because the structure of the flower is more obvious.

I’m continuing to familiarise myself with the features of the latest version of Photoshop and I’m intrigued by ‘Puppet Warp’, a new feature in Photoshop CS5. This works by putting a mesh across your drawing which you can then manipulate by adding node points and pulling and pushing them about to distort the drawing in various ways.

It’s useful for a whole lot more than the ‘puppet’ animation that the name suggests but that’s a good place to start to get to know what it does.

When I drew the walking Moorhen a few years ago I had to draw a dozen or more separate frames to make up the complete action. With Puppet Warp you can do just the one drawing and bend, distort and move it around in Photoshop.

It’s not going to give you the charm of a fully hand-drawn animation but for certain subjects it should work well. It has the advantage that you can avoid the ‘boiling’ effect you get from textures, such as crayon and watercolour, that you can’t possibly match between one hand-drawn frame and the next and it can save a lot of repetitive ‘in-betweening’ between the key frames of the action.

Shapes

IN MY COFFEE BREAK this morning I watched another You Tube video about animating in Photoshop and here are the results of me trying it out. I’m sure this is going to have a useful end result.

I’d been looking out of the window since this morning thinking that I’d like to do a watercolour of the wood in the mist and later in sunshine but I didn’t manage to get my sketchbook out until 5 pm I’d finished my other work. I dispensed with my usual pen and ink and used 2B pencil for speed. The sharp detail had already disappeared but by sketching quickly rather than drawing carefully, I had time to add some colour, relying one my knowledge where the colours are in my box.

Despite the limitations of this sketch which took little more than five minutes, I still prefer it to my animation!

Beaky Animation

I’M JUST STARTING to get familiar with a new version of Photoshop and I’m pleased to find that simple animation seems a lot easier than it did with my old version, Photoshop 7, where you had to jump to another program, Image Ready, to save your work as a GIF.

Here’s a first try. Annoyingly repetitive but at least it shows that I’ve understood the basics.

Canimation

Looking towards the M62 from Starbuck's, Birstall.

There’s a chance to see a sample of the work of the next generation of animators at the cinema today in a short promotional film about the Red Bull Canimation competition. Every entry must prominently feature a can of Red Bull. It doesn’t sound like the most subtle form of product placement but the student animations look suitably impressive.

But I now know why I never made it in the animation world; I just don’t look cool enough, like the young hopefuls in this promo. The other essential is to have a film crew with you – whether you’re wandering in the backwoods or walking along the dreary terraced streets of your hometown – to capture the moment when that surprise call comes to inform you that you’ve made it onto the shortlist.

I like the scene where one young chap runs into the house, phone in hand, gasping excitedly ‘Mum! Dad! I’m going to London!’

Link: Canimation – these competition entries make you feel you don’t always need a Pixar-sized studio behind you to produce a presentable animation. I’ve got a long way to go though.

Game of Shadows

It’s good to see so much illustration in the work of these animators, in some of the advertisements and trailers and in the film we’ve come to see, Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows. The clues to the mystery include a series of charcoal sketches on a very specific type of paper, as you’d expect in a Sherlock Holmes story, and the closing credits include 1890s Strand Magazine style versions of characters and scenes from the movie.

In one scene we see some of the hundreds of details that Sherlock observes as he scans a room, looking for a vital clue.

‘What do you see?’ asks his female companion.

‘I see everything . . . that is my curse!’

It’s such a good line that I feel Conan Doyle himself would have been pleased to come up with it, but I don’t remember it from the stories. It does show that Holmes would have made a good illustrator (like Conan Doyle’s father, grandfather and two of his uncles). In The Greek Interpreter Sherlock claims that he is related, through his grandmother, to the Vernets, a family of French painters.

Family Gathering

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.

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Categorized as Drawing