A bit of practice before I go out drawing figures on location next week. I want the speed of drawing I can get by drawing in fountain pen rather than with an Apple Pencil on the iPad.
I’m using a Lamy Safari filled with a Lamy Black cartridge, which I find flows slightly more freely than the waterproof De Atramentis. But the Lamy Black doesn’t dry waterproof, so I’m adding colour to the scanned drawing in Clip Studio Paint on my iPad.
Flat colour isn’t as subtle as watercolour but in this case that’s not what I’m after; it’s supposed to be a simpler graphic element – along the lines of a lino cut – to contrast with the busy-ness of the pen line.
Those scribbled initials are my colour notes, which I’m leaving in place to give a bit of animation to the drawing.
Dame Barbara drawn in pen and wash in a real sketchbook.
An exhibit at the Hepworth Wakefield shows the method Barbara Hepworth used to cast a small bronze sculpture.
I could draw vice, mallet and hammer at home but I’m taking the opportunity to practice using my iPad Pro on location so the well-worn tools in the display here are suitably familiar subjects to get me started.
I’m sticking with Clip Studio Paint, drawing with the ‘Textured Pen’ for an occasionally blotchy varied line. The colouring is all from the ‘Lasso Fill’ tool. The possibilities for different pens, brushes and textures in Clip Studio are endless but I want to keep things simple to get into the process of drawing on location.
Parkinson’s Patent Perfect Vise (that’s the US spelling)
This is the first time that I’ve used the Sketchboard Pro iPad drawing board on location and I find that it works well. Usefully, the gallery has a supply of comfortable folding stools and the spaces are so light and airy that you can set up without getting in anyone’s way. Well except the people who particularly wanted a close-up view of stage 4 of Barbara Hepworth’s bronze casting process.
The hammer was my first drawing and you can see that I got off to a shaky start pre-coffee break (I can highly recommend the Hepworth blackberry and apple flapjack and sitting at a table by the window looking out at a foaming weir and autumnal willows on a mid-river island makes a suitably relaxing break from drawing). But the great thing about iPad drawing is that you can correct mistakes without scratching away at the paper or touching them out with white gouache.
When I was drawing the bronze casting process I discovered that I’d run out of room on the right-hand side of my virtual canvas. I simply selected the whole drawing and moved it slightly to the left.
It might be 50 years ago since Bill’s homemade stereo spontaneously combusted, singeing my books and diaries on the shelf above but, as he’s my brother I’ve never let him forget it!
I still remember the thrill of first hearing familiar records in stereo for the first time. The track I particularly remember was ‘The Shirt Event from Olympia’ by the Bonzo Dog Band. Going from mono to stereo was the equivalent of switching from 2D to 3D. The surprise was that we could tap into this sophisticated technology with Bill’s concoction of bits of old amps from a record player and radio wired together and held in place with tacks hammered into an offcut of plywood. Initially the speakers weren’t even in boxes, they were just lying there on the floor next to makeshift amplifier.
We now know that attaching a transformer to a piece of wood isn’t a good idea.
Here’s just one of the casualties amongst our treasured records, books and diaries on the metal shelf unit above. I got our local printer Mr Chappell to trim off the worst of the charred edges from my copy of Coyler & Hammond’s Flies of the British Isles. Still readable but hardly a pleasure to use, so naturally when I spotted a pristine copy amongst the secondhand books in the cafe at the National Trust’s Wentworth Castle I went for it.
Nor could I resist Guide to Microlife by Rainis and Russell, Animals under logs and stones by Wheater and Read and Small Freshwater Creatures by Olsen, Sunesen and Pedersen.
Pumpkins drawn on my iPad Pro in Clip Studio Paint, using the ‘Real G-Pen’ and the lasso fill tool for the colour, and Adobe Fresco using the ‘Natural Inker’. The difference between the blotty line of the bottle and watch and the softer line of the pumpkin drawings is just because of the pressure applied when using the Apple Pencil.
As so often, there’s spontaneity about the roughs that I struggle to carry over into the finished artwork.
Rough as album cover
The final version included cheering crowds lining the streets and bunting, but I forgot to scan it but hopefully Abby- happy birthday Abby – has it standing in pride of place on the mantlepiece and can send me a photo.
And she has. It’s not on the mantlepiece though but it is looking good on the kitchen windowsill.
Abby was hoping that she’d entered a prize-winning butternut squash in the Vegan Marathon but it got stuck behind a group of country pumpkins from the slow food movement.”
Voles with impeccable taste for [milk tanker driver] Wayne’s birthday card. Other dairy products from international farmers’ cooperatives are available but we’re with the voles, we like Arla.
I’ve finally had time this weekend to settle down and hatch out the final version of my Chicken Superheroes commission.
To get a crisp black and white drawing, I drew on Bristol Board, on Daler Rowney, A3 250 gsm. I was going to use a dip pen but the first time that I loaded up the nib with Nan-King Indian Ink, it dropped ink blots on the paper, which luckily was my roughs notebook, not the final artwork.
I brought my various roughs together in Photoshop, added lettering in InDesign and printed out a full size version on two sheets of A4, then traced over this onto the Bristol Board, which despite the name is more like a thick cartridge paper. I made a few changes to poses and accessories along the way.
It’s a tradition for superheroes traditionally wear primary colours, partly because of the limitations of colour printing on the poor quality paper that was used for American comics in the 1940s and 50s. I needed yellow for the lettering and red for the wattles and the mask that I’d decided to give each chicken, so I searched for ‘red and yellow colour scheme’ on Google and came up with these swatches that add two purples/violets to the mix.
Happy birthday to Richard, who’s so lucky to have such interesting Metro stations around him in Paris. We have to make do with Finsbury Park, Mornington Crescent and Crouch End. But Harry Hill, the I’m Sorry, I haven’t a Clue team and Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg have made the most of those three, although Crouch End was a fictional tube station, featuring in Shaun of the Dead.
