This week’s sitter on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week was Lesley Garrett, painted by Tom Croft. I’ve painted this straight off in watercolour, with no initial drawing.
Lesley Garrett
Category: Art
One-point Perspective
It’s back to the drawing board with the online course that I started last summer, Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art. This was the technical challenge, to draw a re-imagined version of your room in one-point perspective. Mattias suggested that once we’d established the framework, we should add a few hand-drawn touches but I decided that I’d like to stick with the drafting head on my parallel motion drawing board for all the right angles, adding the perspective lines with a ruler.
Cavendish
The Cavendish banana accounts for 47% of world production and makes the perfect name for a butler, especially as the Cavendish originated from the hothouses of Chatsworth House, the ultimate setting for a country house murder mystery.
I try to catch the individual character of a fruit as I draw it, so how would I bring that out as a cartoon character? The Royal Gala apple made me think of an overindulged Henry VIII character, the lemon of Poirot’s secretary Miss Lemon but it was that last banana, with a deferential hunched stoop and a slightly over-ripe seediness that made me think of an imperious but dodgy butler from a creaky 1930s murder mystery.
His colours are taken straight from the banana my watercolour sketch, using the Photoshop eye-dropper tool. Only the flesh tone needed lightening.
Elderman
“Respect your elders?! Don’t make me laugh.” grumbles Sam Bucus, village elder, when I bump into him on our Monday morning stroll in Illingworth Park, “Hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple . . . they’re all included in Doctor Hooper’s hedgerow dating system except, you guessed it, elder! We’re the forgotten shrubs in the hedge.”
“And did I tell you about the time I auditioned for the part of Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy? Too wooden, indeed!”
Everything in this Photoshop collage was photographed in the Park, this time on a rather dull grey morning, which actually proved useful when constructing the figure as I didn’t have any conspicuous highlights and shadows to deal with. To tie him in with the background, I added a transparent shadow layer, using greens and browns taken with the eye-dropper tool from my background photograph instead of the neutral grey that I might normally use for shadows.
I did consider toning down and blurring the background but decided I’d just stick the original so that the whole thing looked like a regular digital snapshot and didn’t look too stage managed.
I stuck with the old elder boughs growing alongside the allotment fence and I’m pleased with the sinewy anatomical look they give him.
Jon Snow
This week’s final one-hour live portrait-drawing session on Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Week was Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow, painted in oils by Catherine MacDiarmid. As the camera kept cutting to her explaining the progress of the painting, she made it onto the top right hand corner of my page, above Portrait Artist presenter Joan Bakewell.
Jon explained the cunning plan behind his brightly-coloured tie: when he’s interviewing people they’re attracted to the tie, which distracts them from scrutinising his face too closely. It didn’t work on Catherine though, as she added a suggestion of the tie only towards the end of her 4-hour session with him. She explained that she invariably starts a portrait with the ‘golden triangle’ of eyebrows and nose. Once she’s established that she introduces the rest of the face but she’s content not to define the edges, she lets them move freely until she’s happy with them. The mouth, which she finds one of the most difficult features, is usually the last to go in.
Jon’s preference for colour was to extend to his shirt – he thought that he should wear blue – but Catherine requested white as she’s keen on reflected light, even adding a subtle dash of reflected colour of the tie below his chin.
Wood Sculpture
These carved off-cuts of 3×3 inch timber are my attempts from my school days at abstract sculpture, responding to the grain in the wood. Despite my aims, I think that they’ve ended up looking like Kon-Tiki style totem pole figures, so they seem to have a back and a front side.
Drawing them over fifty years later, I’m also reminded of the blocks and joints of the old sandstone quarry on Storrs Hill, which I used to walk past, and sometimes climb on, on my way to and from Ossett Grammar School.
The larger one seems more successful to me. It’s some kind of softwood, perhaps pine, so I was able to gouge into it to bring out target patterns in the grain. The smaller one is beech which has a regular smooth grain, so the shapes that I carved don’t have the same unified look as the pine version.
Barbara and I both think that the smaller carving looks like a female figure. From one angle Barbara can imagine that she’s sitting on a throne, so perhaps they’re like the king and queen in a chess set.
Watercolour Border
I’ve redrawn this border from my Dalesman nature diary featuring the walk around the lake at Newmillerdam Country Park, near Wakefield. In the first version, I thought that the pen and ink was competing too much with the text. To soften it I’ve gone for:
- soft B pencil instead of black ink
- textured watercolour paper instead of smooth cartridge
- loose brushwork, all with a no. 10 sable round, instead of trying to define what textures are
Robo-Parkie
After the success of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s giant robot chicken, it was inevitable that rival attraction Illingworth Park, Ossett, would go one better and be the first to install ‘Robo-Parkie’, the world’s first automated park keeper.
This is another of my Monday Morning in the Park photo assignments: everything in this collage was photographed on our walk around with Barbara’s brother John and put together using Photoshop on my iPad, finishing off with Photoshop on my desktop computer. Taking it all in one session, and from the same angle where possible, meant reasonably consistent light. You might be able to spot bits of wheelie bin, bits of the railings around the football pitch, lettering from the park gates and sections from the goal posts.
Russell Tovey
Thanks to Sky Arts, I got a chance to draw actor and one of this year’s Turner Prize judges, Russell Tovey, today in a one-hour session of Portrait Artist of the Week. I won’t be standing by the phone next week to find out if I’ve won the coveted title as I’ve already seen some of the competition, however some artists had an advantage as they took the chance to start 3 hours earlier as the live programme was preceded by a podcast session. One hour drawing from a screen was enough for me.
At first I thought that perhaps I’d do better if he just sat still instead of chatting to the artist painting his portrait but really that was the point of the session. I could have drawn from a photograph otherwise. The way his expression changed and the way the light changed made the session feel similar to drawing someone in real life.
Robo-Clip
When I’m busy, it’s great to be able to turn to some state-of-the-art technology for a bit of help. Unfortunately this robotic illustrator’s helper isn’t yet available in the shops; I’ve concocted it using Photoshop on my iPad using pen knives and pencil sharpeners from my plan chest drawer. I found that coloured card worked best for selecting the background and cutting it out to isolate the shapes. Masks proved useful again in fine tuning edges but I haven’t yet worked out how to retain the masked effect when I copy and paste an element multiple times, as I did with the ‘Waverley Clip’.
The lens blur on the background image was added in the desktop version of Photoshop as filters aren’t as yet available on the iPad version.