A young heron looking suitably bedraggled in the rain in Regent’s Park last month.
Young Heron
Pigeon
We’re on to planning our animation project on my Procreate Dreams animation course.
For the purposes of this project we need to keep the character design as simple as possible. It may be just 10 to 15 seconds of animation but at 24 frames per second that will potentially involve hundreds, even thousands of drawings.
Old Glove
My favourite gardening gloves are worn through at the fingers, so a good subject for another textures drawing for my Procreate Dreams course.
The various texture brushes will have their uses but I like to be in control so my favourite way of creating a texture is to hand draw it, in this case with Procreate’s Dry Ink brush.
Hyacinth Jar
Three stages of a drawing in Procreate experimenting with different ways of showing textures in an iPad drawing. This is a practical exercise from Brooke Eggleston’s Procreate Dreams animation course on Domestika. For this exercise we went back to the original version of Procreate which has a wider range of drawing tools.
6B Pencil
At first I stuck with the virtual 6B Pencil, which felt close to my regular fountain pen sketchbook drawings.
Smudge Tool
As an illustrator I like to keep things clearly defined, so that the final printed version stays sharp, so stage 2, where I start creating tone by smudging with a virtual Damp Brush, isn’t my usual approach.
The nearest to that in my sketchbooks is when I’m using soluble ink in a fountain pen and I brush over with a drop of water to create a pen and wash effect.
Texture Brushes
In the final stage I used some of the preset texture brushes such as Twisted Tree, Heavy Metal and Rusted Decay from Procreate’s folder of Industrial brushes. I tried to find equivalents for the cross section of soil, roots and moss in the jar and for the sprouting hyacinth leaves.
There are various sparkle brushes available in Procreate but I felt the best way to get the effect of highlights in the glass was to knock back everything but the highlights by brushing in tone, in this case with a Short Hair brush from a Procreate course I took a couple of years ago.
This was intended to be an observational drawing but I could imagine some of those texture brushes being useful if you were trying to evoke a particular style: such as a 19th-century engraving.
I’d come back to this exercise again.
A Useful Tip
On a practical note, I tried replacing the PenTips tip of my Apple Pencil, which I’ve been using for at least a year, perhaps even two. That and cleaning the PenTips magnetic clip-on textured screen protector with my glasses spray and a microfibre cloth seemed to give me better control – more of a feel of drawing on paper.
Kelly, Banger, Mizzy and Guy
My 1981 Wakefield Market acrylic on canvas painting makes a rare appearance at Wednesday’s Wakefield ArtWalk at the Gissing House, Thompson’s Yard, at the top of Westgate, along with some of the sketches I made on location.
I’d taken a new A5 hardback sketchbook and was drawing in fountain pen so I hoped that no-one would notice me scribbling away as I sat on the low wall in front of the Old Queen Elizabeth Gallery and started on the first page sketching the backs of the fruit and veg stalls. No such luck.
“Penny for the Guy, Mister?”
Grudgingly I agreed to make a small contribution to their firework fund on condition that they’d keep still for a few minutes while I drew them. The whole point of my market sketches was to get practice drawing a variety of figures.
I’m sure that poor old Guy didn’t last long but I wonder what creative entrepreneurs Kelly, Banger and Mizzy are up to now. Would be great to meet up with them again at the ArtWalk.
I guess that they might be about 50 years old by now.
Lingering Snow
Yesterday’s snow lingering on at the lower end of Coxley Valley.
School Exercises
Another of my finds from old Wakefield Market. The original isn’t in colour but I thought that the ‘Ripping Yarns’ scenes from Edwardian school life deserved a spot of colourisation in Photoshop.
Knapweed Seedheads
Seedheads of common knapweed, Centaurea nigra, from my patch of wildflower meadow at the end of the garden.
The Noonday Fly
A couple of these striking-looking flies – black with sunburst spots on the wing bases – were basking around the ivy flowers in the south-facing shelter of the walled garden at RSPB Saltholme.
The female Noon Fly, or Noonday Fly, Mesembrina meridiana, lays a single egg on horse or cow dung. The larva is a predator, feeding on other fly larvae in the dung.
A Record of Wakefield’s Market
Sydney Granville as Bill Bobstay, the Boatswain, cover star of this complete performance on 78 rpm records (or it would be complete if one of the 12-inch shellac resin records hadn’t got chipped), makes a guest appearance at my Wakefield Market show at the Gissing Centre, Thompson’s Yard, Westgate, at the next Wakefield Art Walk, on the evening Wednesday, 27 November.
I came across the records at the market on the stalls over towards Vicarage Street, which sold the kind of secondhand bric-a-brac that these days you’d look for at a car boot sale.