Category: Art

Clouds in my Coffee

cauliflower

“Who sings this one?”

“I can hardly hear it,” the waitress replies.

“You’re So Vain.”

“Oh … Carly Simon.”

“That’s it! Brilliant.”

“Shows my age.”

“I’m not surprised she knew,” chips in the other waitress, “She’s always singing. Every day is karaoke here.”

The date and apricot flapjack was good too. It had a hint of bonfire night about it, made with dark brown sugar and, I’m guessing, black treacle.

It’s the one with the line ‘I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee’, which is appropriate because I’m on to my second latté at the Thorncliffe Tasting Room, Emley, while Barbara does a round of the adjoining farm shop for a bag of shopping, including this cauliflower.

This was our first visit to the Tasting Room, although we’d often called at the farm shop but we’ll soon go back there. It’s only six miles from home but it’s another 150 metres in altitude. The panorama included Drax Power Station (currently burning wood pellets sourced from old growth forests in Canada according a recent BBC investigation).

Link

Thorncliffe Tasting Room

First Day, Royal College of Art, 1972

greenhouse rough
Rough for my Greenhouse Mural, an elaborate identification chart for tropical birds that my tutor John Norris Wood kept in the college greenhouse. Yes, that is the Royal Albert Hall in the background, the Greenhouse straddled two floors at the top of the College’s Kensington Gore building.

Saturday 30 September 1972

We set off at 8.30 or so and whisked down the M.1. to Linnie & Dave’s

house in Southall
My sister Linda and David’s first home in Southall

Where we had lunch before going and putting my things in my room at Evelyn Gardens.

Student accommodation
My room on the first floor at 14 Evelyn Gardens, London SW7

Then Shopping – Mother bought a bright Red Trouser Suit.

Continue reading First Day, Royal College of Art, 1972

Fresco G Pen

G pen drawing, Fresco

Trying the new Manga brushes, including the vector G pen in Adobe Fresco.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Pen and Ink

Sketches from Newmillerdam, Harrogate and Queen Street, Horbury, in my pocket-sized A6 landscape Seawhite Travel Journal. Lamy and TWSBI EcoT pens, De Atramentis ink (a mix of brown and black as both were running out).

Hands

Hands drawn on the iPad with Adobe Fresco and Clip Studio Paint plus one in regular pen and ink and watercolour.

Screen Mirroring

rhododendron stems

Clip Studio Paint on the iPad: experimenting with adding colour.

screen mirroring
Screen mirroring in Photoshop: iMac Retina, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil and Sketchboard Pro.
rhododendron

I’m also trying screen mirroring so that if I’m working in, for example, Photoshop on my iMac, and I’ve got something intricate to do, like erasing background texture on a scan of a sketchbook page, I can switch over to working with the Apple Pencil on my iPad.

It would be possible to do a whole drawing this way but with Adobe Fresco, Clip Studio Paint and even a version of Photoshop on the iPad there’s no need to, I can draw directly.

I haven’t noticed any delay when I’m drawing using screen mirroring; the marks appear in real time.

Graphics Pad

For years I’ve used as Wacom Intuos 4 graphics pad for erasing or drawing in Photoshop on the iMac but with the latest Apple operating system, Monterey, Wacom no longer support that model. Working on the iPad should be more flexible, once I’ve learned the ins and outs of it, as I can see the iMac screen on the iPad. The graphics pad was blank, so I got used to drawing on the desktop and seeing the results appear on the iMac.