Category: Art

Bright Day

IT SEEMS so long since we had such a bright day. It’s as if someone has turned up the colour saturation across the landscape. It’s so clear and breezy that distant buildings and wind turbines on the tops of the moors add a sparkle to the panorama of West Yorkshire’s old Heavy Woollen District, as seen from Charlotte’s ice cream parlour up on the ridge at Whitley.

Two ArtPens

The Rotring ArtPen with the fine sketch nib that I drew my brown shoe with this morning is my current favourite. The Noodler’s black ink in it’s fountain pen filler flows smoothly.

My identical ArtPen filled with Noodler’s El Lawrence brown ink by comparison doesn’t flow as consistently. It does’t give me a feeling of inky reliability as sometimes it doesn’t seem to be flowing enough while at other times it will produce a sudden blot.

I have to admit that when it blotted I was holding the pen upside down at a shallow angle to get into a small detail of the roof that I couldn’t seem to reach comfortably  – or see properly – with my hand in the normal position below.

The Dentist’s Chairs

Negative shapes between the chairs.

WITH MY STUDIO taking shape, I feel that I’m beginning to get back my enthusiasm for drawing. I hadn’t lost it really, I’d just found myself beset with other tasks. This morning in the dentist’s, as I didn’t have a direct view of my usual subject, the fish tank, I took the opportunity to draw the chairs. Usually I have time to draw only one chair but today I had the chance to add more. There’s something fascinating about the way one chair places itself in front of another to give a broken rhythm of verticals and horizontals. Considering that they’re such regular shapes, these utilitarian chairs produce odd jigsaw-piece shapes in the empty spaces seen between them.

I might not be diving headlong into a project, as I have been after Christmas during the past three years, when I rushed to get my Rhubarb, Robin Hood and Ossett walks booklets into print to launch at the annual Rhubarb Festival but I feel that I’m creating the possibility of finding more unusually shaped spaces (for drawing) between the rigid and repetitive elements of my life.

The rhythmic repetition and variation in the simplified version of the drawing remind me of the structure of a piece of music. Those little hatching marks, representing the varying weave of alternate carpet tiles are like the minor variations that you’d have within the larger blocks that shape a musical composition.

Simplifying the design to flat colours gives a retro feel, like Penguin paperback covers of the 1950s and 60s so, with some lettering added, I could see this as an album cover for some rather laid-back music inspired by the jazz of that era. Some of those shapes remind me of the floating shapes in Miro paintings or the stylised backgrounds of a 1950s cartoon . . .

This could be cityscape perhaps. Or perhaps I’d better stop messing about with Photoshop!

Because of a hitch with the equipment, I had to return to the dentist's in the afternoon and this time I had a seat by the goldfish tank.

The Snows of Yesterday

I’VE WRITTEN several times about my great grandfather George who worked in the cutlery trade in Sheffield. Here’s a watercolour by his son Maurice Swift, my grandfather. It’s signed ‘M. Swift age 13’ so that means that he painted it around 1900.

The farmhouse on the hillside with its shelter belt of trees could be a real location on the Peak District side of Sheffield, or perhaps it is imagined with that kind of country in mind. I phoned my mum to say that I’d been surprised to come across it in a drawer in my plan chest – I’d forgotten all about it. She suggests that it might be a copy of a picture and remembers that it was once framed. It’s mounted on a kind of brittle card, 2 or 3 millimetres thick, which is typical of that period.

Like so many family treasures, my mum had put it in an anonymous brown envelope, (postmark dated December 1986, which I guess might have been about the time that she handed it to me; she’s pencilled my name in block capitals on the back of the envelope).

Coffee and Cakes

AFTER SUCH a busy year, Christmas gives us a good excuse for catching up with friends . . . and Barbara’s chocolate cake proves popular.

It’s also a chance to meet my youngest great nephew Ted, although he proves too active for me to catch more than a few impressions as he moves about the room. At 10 months he’s not yet walking.

One of the mysteries of family gatherings is that one moment the room is full of people, the next they’ve all gone off in different directions, but this does at least mean that I can have a change from following a moving target to draw an armchair instead.

Adding Texture

Here’s a Photoshop technique that my friend John Welding showed me yesterday when we called on him and Helen for coffee and Ecclefechan tarts (from the town of that name in Dumfries and Galloway, an alternative to mince pies).

1. Fill with colour: Starting with the drawing that I made of the armchair, I add a flat colour in the normal way, which, for me, involves cutting out the white background of the image so that I’ve just got the pen and ink line and the rest is transparent, then filling an armchair-shaped selection on the layer beneath with colour.

2. Find a texture: I take a photograph of a texture, in this case it’s the canvas of one of my art-bags.

3. Add overlay: I add the texture as an overlay on a new layer which goes over the colour, but beneath the pen and ink line.

The settings that you use when you create this texture layer are important; you should select the option ‘overlay’. Obvious really. Then experiment with the transparency until you get the effect you’re after. You can easily change this later. For the purposes of demonstration, I’ve used 84% to make it obvious but John suggested around 20% transparency which can give you the kind of subtle effects that you might associate with watercolour, printmaking, wax-resist or scrafitto (scratching through a layer of paint or of a glaze in pottery).

He’d normally use a more random texture, such as fur or rusted metal.

I look forward to doing some further experiments so that I can feel confident enough to add the overlay technique to my limited repertoire of Photoshop skills.

Hand Sketch

I’M GETTING used to a new computer and I’ve scanned this quick sketch, just to check that the link from sketchbook to scanner to Photoshop and finally to WordPress post really is working.

I drew this in the dentist’s waiting room yesterday – I’ve drawn the goldfish in the tank there so many times that I thought I’d have a change . . . and drawn my hand. Again.

Now that I’ve installed my new computer I look forward to having time to get out to fresh new places to draw some new subjects but that’s not going to happen today as gales are forecast this afternoon as a low pressure area sweeps in from the Atlantic.

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Field Glasses

THESE 10 X 50, 5° field of view binoculars, date from the 1960s. They’ve outlasted several other pairs and while they’re too heavy to have them swinging around your neck for long periods, they’re ideal for keeping on my shelf in the studio if I spot a bird in the wood.

The brand is Cosmo, which I believe was Russian.

This week, on my mum’s regular visit to the opticians, I had time to draw the view up Horbury High Street (right), adding the colour later but last week I had time not only for a more elaborate drawing but also to add watercolour at the time;

See-Through Chair

The optician’s has recently had a revamp and, appropriately, they’ve gone for transparent chairs. I felt that the best way to depict the transparency was to show the way the background appeared as seen through the chair.

The Goldilocks Effect

By disposing of my old oak plan chest (represented by the cardboard rectangle, bottom right) and going for a new slimline version (white card) I should end up with the studio that I'm after.

THE FAR END of the studio was too dim . . . this end is too bright . . . but I reckon the other wall at this end will be just right.

After all my efforts moving the furniture yesterday, I soon realise this morning that my desk is now in the wrong place because the winter sun is streaming across my computer screen. Yes, I can pull down the blind but what a shame to shut out the view of the garden and Coxley Valley beyond; I’d be much better facing the other wall where I’d only catch the early morning sun. I’m rarely at my desk at six in the morning.

But I don’t want to swap the bookshelves and the desk around as sunlight would soon fade the dust-jackets. No, I could really do with a slimmed down plan chest behind me as I sit at my desk.

I’ve got wonderful 3D programs like Sketchup on my computer but when it comes to re-planning my studio I feel the need to make a simple cardboard plan (above), abandoning metric for the more familiar (to me) option of one inch equals one foot. Ikea have recently introduced ‘Alex’, a six-drawer unit that fits A2 sized paper. Discussing it with Simon the joiner, we decide that putting three of those on a six-inch plinth, with a worktop running along above, will give me the storage that I need for artwork and paper, plus a working space for folding and guillotining the booklets that I still produce in-house.

Tilly proved a restless model when I called at the bookshop this afternoon. Tilly is usually a restless model and she also has a habit of disappearing altogether into her 'den' beneath the desk.

 

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Bookshelves

AS I TYPE this the rain is lashing against the studio window and the trees in the wood have been stripped of leaves. It’s been a good day to stay indoors and reorganise my studio. Yesterday evening it occurred to me that if I swapped around my old oak plan chest and my desk, I’d have a better view from the window and, for much of the day better light.

The plan chest is so substantial that it had never before occurred to me that it was movable. Yes, it was quite a job to remove and stack the ten drawers packed with artwork,  but I’d slid them back in place by eleven.

The L-shaped arrangement of my desks together at the window end gives me more room to spread around my reference books and sketches when I’m working while around the plan chest at the darker end of the studio, I can build some much-needed shelves for my steadily overflowing books.

But these old books aren’t mine; I drew these in Rickaro’s where they’re celebrating 10 years since the bookshop opened. Local writer Ian MacMillan and cartoonist Tony Husband were the special guests. However Tilly, the bookshop Welsh border collie was not invited!

Sales Pitch

My studio revamp is in honour of a computer upgrade. Telling the salesman in a busy store that I’m keen to have a machine that can handle graphics, I show him the sketches I’ve been making while I waited in their recently introduced queuing system.

“I thought that I’d have a chance to draw the staff as they gather by a computer to talk to customers but you’re never still!”

“Welcome to our world!”

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Chairs

MY BIG SISTER posted a comment yesterday to say that I was beginning to sound like a computer geek (wish I was sometimes, that would be so useful) so just to prove that I haven’t totally exchanged pen and ink for mouse and graphic pad here are a few recent drawings from my sketchbook. I have to admit that when drawing this row of chairs as we waited for my mum at the doctor’s I did find myself thinking ‘how would I do this in Sketchup’.

These magazines would be fiddly to design on a 3D program. The basic shapes would be simple enough but the dog-eared corners would need adding individually.

Desert Lake

I’M BACK in Bryce 7 territory as I trek my way through the basic tutorials to re-familiarise myself with the programme after a couple of years when I couldn’t get it working on my machine. The last time I went through this tutorial, using Bryce 4 in 2004 (left), I added a few rocks to the lake shore. The rendering of the scene has improved, making the most of the capabilities of my new computer. I’m almost ready to supply the images for a National Geographic article.

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