The cherry trees surrounding the Hospice are all the same age and currently they’re being lopped back. Hopefully they’ll burst into blossom again, but we might have to wait until next year until they’ve fully recovered.
This started as a Staffordshire bull terrier but I kept adding more and more shaggy hair. I’m trying out Román GarcÃa Mora’s suggestions for tonal drawing on an iPad, using his palette of four greys plus black and white in his Introduction to Procreate course.
In Procreate ‘Colour Drop’ is the equivalent of the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. It’s a ‘hidden’ tool activated by a drag and drop from the current colour swatch, which is always there in the top right-hand corner of the Procreate drawing screen.
Compared to pen on paper, I’m struggling to control my line when drawing on an iPad, even with a Paperlike screen protector (although after three or four months that has worn fairly smooth). For the lettering I tried Procreate’s method where you pause at the end of a line, curve or ellipse. Procreate works out what you were trying to draw and turns it into a smooth, editable vector version.
Drawing isometric shapes isn’t going to be my strong point.
My unaided line is too wobbly, the vector version to smooth but I’m sure I’ll hit on a ‘Goldilocks Zone’ version which will be just right!
Just in case you were wondering how I was getting on fifty years ago today in my second term at at the Royal College of Art . . .
On the morning of Friday 19 January 1973 I got to my first concert at the Royal Albert Hall, next door to the Kensington Gore Darwin Building where I was painting my ‘Greenhouse Mural’.
Met Judith Chapman a school friend of my brother’s when I went to buy my ticket
What splendid acoustics the Albert Hall has. There was a sharp noise at the beginning of Fidelio Overture which echoed . . . very dramatic. Andre Tchaikovsky played the piano in Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini by Rachmaninov . . .
Andre Tchaikovsky died in 1982 but his name still appears on the programme ofr productions of Hamlet because he bequeathed his skull to Royal Shakespeare Company.
In the afternoon I’d been in the Illustration Department discussing various projects with typographer Malcolm Winton. My idea that if I had a distraction-free month (in a lighthouse) I could finish my Natural History of Wakefield was mistaken. It took me another five years to get it into print.
So not surprisingly, back my room at the college student hostel, at 14 Evelyn Gardens, I was considering what progress I’d made and what I’d like to do next. Fifty years ago, in my diary for Monday 22 January 1973, I was contemplating the next fifty years:
Where am I now? Or, where would I have been if I hadn’t succeeded in getting a place here, for, as it happened, I didn’t manage to get a place on Post-Diploma.
Would I still be hawking round with folder and photocopies, staying with Dave and Linnie while I toured the London publishers?
Or would I be buried in a Northern Agency . . . or school museums?
Home: Poppleton’ Mill, Horbury Bridge, from my January 1972 sketchbook
Probably for I do not feel my illustrations or myself are competent or confident enough to take on real life. So I must get some work and working out done during this next 3 years . . . and get some outlets for my work going.
Planning for the next 50 years!
Perhaps I shouldn’t worry if I don’t work out everything of my art and attitude . . . if I did the next 50 years would be rather dull.
I think that my attitudes have hardly changed since I was seven or so.
The usual pattern for Monday mornings is that, while I sit and draw ducks, Barbara and her brother John walk off around the lake. Sadly not today as John was admitted to hospital yesterday. Monday mornings are just not going to be the same.
“Would you like to see what Richard’s been drawing?” asks Barbara.
“No,” says John.
“It’s good!” I reassure him.
“It’s always good when Richard draws it.” he replies.
Glad his condition hasn’t affected his aesthetic judgement.
