Category: Art

Arum Berries

arum berries

The ripening berries of the cuckoo pint look like bunches of party balloons. These were growing in a small group by the roadside but in the wood, where it grew with tropical luxuriance in the spring, we don’t see any berries.

For English school children, it’s just the beginning of the long summer vacation but there’s an end-of-summer feeling as we negotiate an overgrown footpath between the seedheads of shoulder-high false oat grass, stooping to avoid overhanging stems of bramble.

meadow brown

This meadow brown, enjoying the honey-scented flowers of creeping thistle alongside the footpath, looks a bit the worse for wear. One theory is that the eye-spots save the butterfly from serious injury because a bird would peck at them but it looks as if whatever attacked this butterfly went for the hindwings.

Published
Categorized as Drawing

The Water Margin

brush drawing

I’m reading James A. Michener’s The Hokusai Sketchbooks, so this morning at Newmillerdam, as a change from pen and watercolour, I’ve gone for Chinese brush and Noodler’s Black Ink.

Noodler's Ink and Chinese brushes

Lying in the lakeside mud beside me, was a freshwater mussel shell, so I used that as a suitably oriental-looking palette to mix my grey ink wash. I dipped my cup in the water and, as I started to paint, realised that I’d caught two small water creatures – water beetles perhaps – which I released unharmed at the end of my session.

close-up of brush drawing

I wonder if the granular quality of the wash is a characteristic of Noodler’s, or whether it was debris in the water.

drawing by the lake

In England, our school holidays have now started and the lakeside path was a bit busier than usual however, in this willowy backwater, I had this corner of floating world to myself. Just me and a few passing mallards and a coot that came ashore within a few feet of me, apparently oblivious of me until I moved.

It’s there in the bottom right-hand corner of my drawing.

Bird, Man and Dog

A test for my new iPad Pro: a pencil rough of a cartoon walk drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Now that I’ve familiarised myself with the way it works again, I’ll go on to try something more ambitious.

Just one thing to work out is how to export the finished animation – it’s disappearing into a black hole at the moment instead of saving to a file – which is why I’ve had to show it in a movie taken with my iPhone.

The Foxes’ Ball

anxious fox
cartoon fox

They brought us:

  • one pink-and-yellow cricket practice ball (which I must return to our neighbours’ spaniel, Rogue, two doors up the road)
  • three tennis ball in varying degrees of fluffiness and squishiness
  • two dead rats

In the veg beds they’ve flattened our seedling Musselburgh leeks, broken into the netting over our dwarf French beans and dug a series of small neat holes.

The fun and games didn’t stop with stolen tennis balls: they also dug up several of our ball-sized Sturton onions and stashed most of them at the bottom of the hedge but one was taken over to the middle of the path by the shed at the other side of the garden.

A single broad bean pod was neatly nipped off and left in the middle of the now flattened leek bed.

cartoon fox

Digitally Drawn

Sketches Pro

As for once I hadn’t taken my sketchbook with me, I literally drew with a digit yesterday, using a finger on my iPhone screen in Tayasui Sketches Pro (left) as we sat with a mint and lime drink in the shaded courtyard of Horbury’s Flamingo Teapot Cafe but after all the large-scale pen and watercolour work that I’ve done for my Redbox Gallery show, I felt that it was about time I tried drawing with my Apple Pencil on my iPad Pro again.

The man in the hat and the sumac were drawn in Adobe Fresco, using its virtual ‘Blake’ pen for the drawing.

Paperlike

Would I find it easier if I used a matt screen protector, like Paperlike, on my iPad, to give it a more natural feel? Or a rubberised tip for the Apple Pencil, to give it a hint of resistance as it moves over the glass screen?

Adobe Fresco sketch

Drawing on the iPad is never going to be as familiar to me as pen on paper but I’m keen to have the best possible image so I’d have to avoid any matt screen protector because it adds a very slight amount of colour fringing to the image.

Redbox Show

Redbox Gallery
chimnies

Thanks to my scale model, we found that my Addingford and Joby cut-outs just fitted into the Redbox Gallery, although we did have to do a bit of jiggling about with the lengths of 10lb breaking strain fishing line that are holding up the storks cut-out and the speech bubbles.

Redbox Gallery show
St Peter's Church, Horbury

On Tuesday I drew St Peter’s Church spire from the dentist’s waiting room, which is just around the corner from the Redbox.

Addingford Logo

logo

For my ‘Addingford’ logo for my Redbox show, I resisted the temptation to echo the Addingford Steps location by drawing 3D lettering chiselled from stone, like a Charlton Heston epic from the 1950s but I did feel that I needed something blocky so I’ve gone for what’s called an Egyptian-style hand-drawn font – one with squared-off serifs – and I felt that it should be slightly condensed.

cut-out lettering

The vermillion (Winsor & Newton ink) is a nod towards the telephone box setting of the show and intended as a colour contrast with all the green in the artwork. It also picks out, more or less, the colour of Joby’s pullover.

The Watchers by the Pond

cut-out figures
speech bubble
First rough for a speech bubble.

More unusual visitors at our garden pond and although my cut-out characters now bear little resemblance to the Patrick Stewart and Richard Tolan as Joby and his dad in the Yorkshire Television version of Stan Barstow’s Joby, they have the folksy quality that I was after for my Redbox Gallery show.

They’ll be sitting on a riverbank, a folding screen of two A1 sheets of foamboard. Time to get out my largest brush, a varnish brush, to add the indigo blue of the Calder.

river artwork

Heads Up

grids for copying drawing

It may seem obtuse to turn my artwork upside down as I enlarge my characters from A3 to A1 with the aid of a grid, but with such a large sheet of foamboard, it’s easier to reach the top this way. When it came to the faces, I drew a tighter grid to help me get the details in proportion.

Besides, as Betty Edwards points out in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, upside-down drawing helps you make the shift to ‘R-mode’, so that the logical left side of the brain isn’t continually saying ‘Ah, I know what this is . . .’ (a nose, for example) ‘so don’t need to look so carefully now’. When you switch over to your right side, she suggests, you draw the shapes as they are, without preconceptions.

Even so, when I came to the eyes of these characters, I could feel myself thinking, no, that’s not right, that doesn’t feel as if I’m drawing an eye.

Look forward to turning the board right side up.

On the Grid

I’ve started on the main characters for my Redbox Gallery, with a cloth-capped Patrick Stewart as Joby’s father and Joby himself, played by Richard Tolan.

rough for Joby illustration

I’ve gridded up my A3 drawing, ready to transfer to A1-size foamboard.

My little rough yesterday was sketchy enough to suggest the figures but now I’ve started defining them more, I’m going to have to tidy things up a bit, hopefully without losing the liveliness of the rough.

stork cut-outs

And what’s this, down at our garden pond? These foamboard cut-out storks might seem too big for a phone box-sized gallery but I’ve checked that out with my little scale-model mock-up and they should fit in nicely. Being white, they should show up well in what can be a rather dimly-lit space.