Category: Art

1967

In 1967, aged 16, I’d just finished my O-levels and was looking forward to starting a foundation course at Batley School of Art. I used homemade scraperboard (wax crayon covered with india ink, which I then scratched into. You could buy a special nib) for the historical characters, which were inspired by a day trip to York but I soon turned to a dip pen with the finest nib I could find.

At the V&A and at Oxford, I was on the look out for illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, which I’d decided to illustrate as a comic strip. Looking back, it’s a shame I didn’t try illustrating it with the scraperboard technique. It would have been more expressive but more difficult to control.

Homemade Water Plant Basket

Our purple iris in the pond is top heavy, as we haven’t transplanted it from the small pond plant basket it came in.

We cut down an old plastic plant pot and drilled extra holes on its sides. We put a few pebbles in it for ballast before adding ordinary garden soil and planting the iris.

We used an off cut from an old tea towel, spread around the iris to hold the soil in place and added a few more pebbles to hold that in place.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Freehand Perspective

freehand perspective drawing

I’m drawing our sparrow nestbox for a forthcoming article in The Dalesman and, rather than draw it from life or trace it from a photograph, I’m trying freehand perspective. I didn’t draw an horizon line or plot vanishing points, I just drew as near to the way they appear in a photograph.

Having used ruler and set square for the pencil, I’ll use my usual freehand fountain pen for the drawing itself, so hopefully it will looked relaxed but plausible.

Digital Colouring

Digital colouring

I like the printed look that you get using flat colours so I’ve been going through a tutorial on digital colouring. It should work well in my printed publications.

You scan your pen and ink drawing in black and white drawing at 600 dpi, using the ‘text’ setting. This is to avoid the slightly fuzzy ‘anti-aliased’ edges you’d get using the regular 300 dpi colour or grayscale settings. In Adobe Photoshop you can then go to the Channels palette (above) and press that first button at the bottom of the palette ‘Load Channel as Selection’.

Invert the selection and, on a new layer and fill with the foreground colour. For a comic strip you’d fill with pure black but here I’ve filled with brown.

Lock this line art layer you’ve created add the flat colours on separate layers, with shading, as on the wall in my top illustration, on another layer.

grayscale version of the illustrations

I tried the ‘Load Channel as Selection’ with my finished colour version then, after inverting it as before, filled it with black, producing this grayscale version.

Gatepost

gatepost

To give the gatepost a black and white treatment, I marked the shapes of the shadows – the spot blacks as they’re called in comics – with an ‘x’, then filled in with a Pentel Brush Pen. Drawn using a Lamy nexx with a bold nib.

Hilary’s

Hilary's, Cawthorne

Looking at Hilary’s cafe from the garden you can guess which was the original cottage and in what order the adjacent cottage, lean-to extensions and extensions of extensions were added.