Really appreciated the dedication of London-based Johana & Maxim Kroft, a.k.a. Idea & Maker, who are currently living in Vancouver getting up at 4.30 a.m. for today’s lunchtime Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session.
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Idea and Maker
Rachel Millar
Rachel Millar, lettering artist, on today’s Adobe Live ‘From the Sofa’ session.
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Rachel E Millar signwriter (or signpainter) and lettering artist based in Glasgow, Scotland.
Make Yourself into a Character
Barbara says the one drinking tea looks most like me, but I guess that’s the default position that she sees me in. My favourite is the first where I’m drawing. I like the out-of-control pen work! Gives him some life.
This is the latest in my Mattias Adolfsson The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art course. The idea is to simplify the character as far as possible. It doesn’t have to be a portrait as such. The next stage is to feature the character in a cartoon and I think that will be helpful because when I work out what I want him to do, that should give me a few clues about how to develop the character. If he just has to look blank and slightly worried, I’m there already!
Thomas & Tony
Today’s Adobe Live From the Sofa session, introduced by Tony Harmer, featured the 3D designs and illustrations of Thomas Burden.
Thomas Burden: wearegrownup.com
Thomas Burden on Instagram
Broad Beans
There’s a background buzz of bumble and what look like honey bees amongst the flowers fo these broad beans. A song thrush sings from nearby bushes. Yesterday afternoon there was a bit of drama as a crow chased a jackdaw away from the ash trees at the edge of the wood – perhaps the crows have a nest there.
Wild Yorkshire on Instagram
I’ve been posting on Instagram more regularly since I worked out how to upload images from my desktop iMac. It’s pretty much what I post on this wildyorkshire.blog but with the emphasis more on the images. Recently it’s been mainly cartoons interspersed with a few wild flowers from our lockdown exercise walks but I will have to get back to a bit more drawing from nature for my Wild Yorkshire diary in The Dalesman.
You can find my Instragram page at www.instagram.com/wildyorkshire
Emojis
Mattias Adolfsson describes his alter ego cartoon character, as ‘always clueless’ and in this emojis exercise from his Art of Sketching course, that was the expression that appealed to me. The idea is to evoke an expression with the minimum of marks, so, apart from ‘anger’, top right, I’ve dispensed with eyebrows.
Could I evoke a familiar face using the same minimal format? My favourite amongst them is Boris. Probably one of the few times the words ‘Boris’ and ‘favourite’ have appeared in the same sentence recently!
Great Brome
It droops like oats and it has long awns like barley. As this is growing at the edge of a wheat field, I’m guessing that it is great brome, Anisantha diandra, although there are some similar-looking species. Great brome is a grass from the Mediterranean region which grows on waste ground, roadsides and field edges.
The Wikipedia reports that it, and a similar brome, also get referred to as ‘ripgut brome’ in some parts of the world, where the species have become troublesome weeds.
Table Talk
Another lockdown birthday, this time for Sofia, aged 12, who created a table character for a booklet of What am I? puzzles.
Just been talking to a neighbour who’s a teacher. Getting schools running again is proving an even more difficult than closing them.
Fox-and-Cubs
Fox-and-cubs grows from between the stones by the bridge at Smithy Brook. Some years ago a few rosettes of it popped up at the top end of our lawn at the edge of the patio. Much as I like the flowers, we made efforts to weed them out because they can spread by stolons (creeping stems on the surface) and rhizomes (under ground storage stems) into turf where they are near-impossible to eradicate.