Category: Art

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

Gable Ends

THIS IS just the relaxed kind of drawing which I like to use my fine-nibbed ArtPen for. Adding colour, even the subdued colour of old brick and stone and grey winter skies, adds another dimension and more information, and helps to establish mood and atmosphere.

The views are disjointed because I was limited to drawing the details that I could see through the gaps in the vertical blinds at Barbara’s brother John’s when we called to see him and Margaret this morning.

Dewsbury to Leeds

I ADDED most of the colour later to these sketches from an afternoon’s return journey to Leeds from Dewsbury. The bolder line from the fine-nibbed ArtPen works well for drawing on the train or on station platforms.

Cowslips Warren

Fiver in the film, copyright Watership Down Productions, 1978.

I’VE WRITTEN before about my time working in the background department on the film version of Watership Down (see 5 November 2002) and included some roughs but here’s some of the actual artwork, which I’ve just found while going through the drawers of my plan chest. It’s drawn with a fine dip pen nib, a Gillot 303 or 1950, in Pelikan Special Brown Indian ink. This technique didn’t lend itself to the production size so I drew it half size and they photographed and printed a full-sized, sepia-toned version on matt paper.

The original drawing is about 5½ x 4 inches. It was an odd experience to see my postcard-sized drawing projected on the cinema screen – along with the animation, the music and the vocal talents of John Hurt and Richard Briers amongst others in that particular scene.

Another background artist added the colour later. No wonder I’m described as ‘Assistant Background Artist’ on the credits. As I’d explained when I took on the job, after working through the autumn on the film in London, I wanted to get back to Yorkshire by springtime to complete work on my first book, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield.

Like Cowslip’s Warren, this sketchbook format nature guide was drawn in brown ink using a fine-nibbed dip pen and printed – single colour – in the Pantone equivalent of Special Brown.

The Lime Green Sketchbook

3.30 pm; THREE Long-tailed Tits join the Goldfinches, House Sparrows, Bullfinch, Greenfinch, Chaffinch, Great Tit and Blue Tit already at or around the bird feeders. While most of the other birds are going for the sunflower hearts in the feeders or spilt below, the Long-tails go for the fat-balls.

A Wood Pigeon lands on the ivy in front of our next-door neighbour's. The ivy berries, now ripe, are probably the attraction.

Great Tits, Blue Tits and sparrows will also go for the fat-balls but we don’t recall seeing any of the finches feeding on them.

We’ve given up on putting out peanuts. They get left whenever sunflower hearts are available and they soon go soft.

The downside to this is that peanuts – especially red bags of peanuts – are particularly attractive to Siskins and, so far, we haven’t seen this small finch at the feeders this winter.

New Sketchbook

So far I’ve been saving my lime green A5 landscape format Pink Pig sketchbook for natural history subjects; I managed to draw 14 pages last year between mid-May and the beginning of August before events took over and I had to be content with a few snatched moments of natural history in my regular sketchbook.

That regular sketchbook, a black A5 portrait format sketchbook with soft, bleed-through cartridge paper that I’ve never cared for, is now complete and the drawing of the lime
green sketchbook (above) is the last that I’ve got room for.

I’m now going to use the green for my everyday sketches but, of course, I’m hoping that on most days that will involve natural history.

Chimney drawn from the optician's waiting room last month.

The little black book contains so many waiting room sketches – I take my mum to about 50 appointments through the year, and then there’s our regular visits to dentists etc on top of that – so the lesson that I can learn is always to carry some ‘natural form’ object with me, for those inevitable unplanned periods where I have to wait a little longer than expected; a pebble, a leaf, a fossil or a feather for instance.

The most popular waiting room subjects in the little black book were architectural details (11), chairs (7), hands (4), trees seen through the window (3), piles of magazines (2) and my shoe and the reception desk at the doctors (1 of each). There are also three sets of sketches of the goldfish in the dentist’s.

Café Rouge

Here are the last couple of sketches drawn on location in the black book this lunch time at Café Rouge in Meadowhall between my first one-to-one session learning a bit more about my new computer at the Apple store and heading off to Orgreave with a consignment for our book suppliers.

You might be thinking whatever happened to our ideal of getting back to healthy eating, well, apparently the grilled chicken with roast vegetables and bulgar wheat amounts to just 600 calories.

How many calories the chocolate and banana crepe contained we didn’t trouble ourselves to find out.

 

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.