Horbury High Street, drawn when we took my mum to the optician’s for her weekly appointment. Lamy Safari pen.
I’VE BEEN using my Lamy Safari fountain pen a lot recently but this afternoon on our walk around Newmillerdam I’ve just got my passport-sized pouch attached to my belt (I realise that’s more comfortable than having it swinging around my neck like a camera case) so, for this chimney drawn from a table at the Lakeside Kitchen, that means that I’m back to my brown 08 Pilot Drawing Pen, which has the advantage that I can add watercolour without the ink running.
The pocket-sized Hahnemuehle travel booklet that I keep in the pouch has more absorbent ‘sketch paper’ than my other sketchbooks; fountain pen tends to bleed but the Drawing Pen works fine. As you can see, it doesn’t flow like the fountain pen in the drawing of Horbury High Street.
Lamy Safari pen drawing of sweet corn in Horbury Library’s garden last Tuesday.
It’s a change for me to apply watercolour that immediately soaks in, rather than staying on the surface just a little, as it does on the fairly smooth cartridge paper that I normally use. The off white, creamy coloured paper makes a change from white too.
I THINK of English Oaks like this as being great galleons of trees with masses of dense dark foliage but as I sketched this one in wet-on-wet watercolour I realised that there’s a lot of empty space in that canopy.
This is the last page in my little travel booklet sketchbook and I’m now going to make myself a European passport-sized sketchbook, which is one centimetre shorter than the traditional Moleskine notebook. That should fit snugly into my mini-art-bag, which is intended as a passport wallet.
I’ll be using a whiter paper than this, which will make it easier to scan but I’ve enjoyed using this Hahnemuehle sketch paper. It’s more absorbent than the cartridge that I’m used to so watercolour washes soak in almost instantly, instead of lying on the surface. It gives a mat granular quality to the watercolour. This isn’t all that obvious in my same size scans but you can get an idea from this close up of a part of my drawing just 18 millimetres across in which you can see the individual fibres of the paper.
My first attempt at a pen and wash effect using the filters in 'Photoshop'.
MY ILLUSTRATOR friend John Welding was telling me about a science fiction short story from years ago about a world where instead of having to go to the trouble of drawing things artists had only to dial up the appropriate rubber stamp.
That day has arrived because the new version of Photoshop that I’m using includes a stamp filter (left). So much quicker than making your own lino-cut.
Filter Gallery
I’m new to this version of Photoshop so this is the first chance that I’ve had to play around with the Filter Gallery, which is useful as you get instant full size previews of the effects of the filters on offer. By using slider controls you can fine tune the effect.
The Watercolour Filter (left) simplifies the photograph to blocky colour.
To get the effect of a pen and watercolour wash drawing you need to add line. In Photoshop, as with most other image manipulation programs, you do this on a new layer.
Find Edges
This time the filter you need, ‘Find Edges’, doesn’t appear in the Filter Gallery; you’ll find in the Filter Menu under ‘Stylize’.
This gives you rather more than the pure line that you’re after (right), even if you try converting the image to grayscale before you start as I did in this example. There are no slider controls to filter out the tones. You now need to go to . . .
Threshold
To reduce this to pure black and white you need to use the ‘Threshold’ command from the image menu, something I’ve used a lot when scanning my pen and ink artwork when I wanted to print it in line rather than tone.
Just to keep you on your toes, the Threshold command can’t be found amongst the Filters. It’s in the Image menu under Adjustments. Like most of the filters this has a slider control so you can go from almost black to almost washed out.
The ‘pen’ layer, as you might expect, needs to go on top of the ‘watercolour’ layer but to make it transparent you have to set the ‘pen’ layers properties to ‘Multiply’ instead of ‘Normal’ (top).
The finished result wouldn’t convince anybody that I’d used real pen and ink and watercolours but I love that chunky effect and I’d be tempted to use it when I’m painting real watercolours.
I HAD INTENDED to make a start on the garden this afternoon but it was so cold – well not just cold it was so damp too with ‘freezing rain’ part of the forecast – so I got on with some office work instead. However by quarter to five, I thought that I was entitled to spend half an hour drawing. The bleary view out of the rain-spattered studio window meant that sharp focus drawing was out of the question so I dipped straight into the watercolour for these two sketches drawn during the last half-hour of daylight.
Our Crumbling Conveniencies
I drew this picturesquely crumbling wall this morning as I waited for my mum at the opticians, adding the drab colour later.
If I remember rightly, about 40 years ago this wall formed one end of a rather rudimentary public toilets. It was demolished and a cherry tree was planted on the spot. Such basic facilities wouldn’t meet today’s standards and the scrap value of copper has now risen so that within a few weeks the plumbing would probably get ripped out anyway, the result being that Horbury doesn’t have any public toilets these days.
I’VE WRITTEN several times about my great grandfather George who worked in the cutlery trade in Sheffield. Here’s a watercolour by his son Maurice Swift, my grandfather. It’s signed ‘M. Swift age 13’ so that means that he painted it around 1900.
The farmhouse on the hillside with its shelter belt of trees could be a real location on the Peak District side of Sheffield, or perhaps it is imagined with that kind of country in mind. I phoned my mum to say that I’d been surprised to come across it in a drawer in my plan chest – I’d forgotten all about it. She suggests that it might be a copy of a picture and remembers that it was once framed. It’s mounted on a kind of brittle card, 2 or 3 millimetres thick, which is typical of that period.
Like so many family treasures, my mum had put it in an anonymous brown envelope, (postmark dated December 1986, which I guess might have been about the time that she handed it to me; she’s pencilled my name in block capitals on the back of the envelope).
I FEEL AS IF I’ve got out of the habit of sketching at every opportunity but odd sketches are beginning to appear in my A5 sketchbook again, so that’s a good sign.
Inspired by Fabrice Moireau’s Paris Sketchbook, a birthday present from Barbara, I’ve been trying to shift the balance of my drawings a bit from line to watercolour. Moireau also convinced me that it would be worth trying pencil again but these recent sketches have been done in odd moments when I haven’t had a pencil to hand.
Sox the border collie was snoozing in Rickaro Bookshop in Horbury.
The back garden of the Victorian villa (top) is my mum’s, drawn on a sunny afternoon.
And that’s it, except for an old wall by the co-op car park in Horbury. Not much to show for the last week or so but better than nothing.
4 pm; I was going to draw birds but there was little activity by the time I’d filled up the feeders and settled down with my sketchbook. A couple of Blue Tits briefly peer out from the hedge, a Robin flits about below, a Blackbird pecks in distracted haste at the bare earth of the border while over in the wood, three Woodpigeons are clattering around in the tops of the Ashes.
Yesterday morning I was sorry to see this large Ash (left) in Horbury Cemetery being felled, one of several that are to go. It appears to be a healthy specimen but there’s no doubt that in some gale over the next decade or so it would have blown down, causing considerable damage to the houses that were built adjacent to the cemetery in the 1960s, when the tree was probably already half a century old (if I get the opportunity, I’ll count the rings). Unfortunately trees can do more than damage property and this autumn, during one evening of high winds punctuated by more powerful gusts, a huge bough from a tree at Stanley Churchyard crashed down onto a passing car, fatally injuring a woman.
Luckily the Ashes and Crack Willows in my watercolour of the lower end of Coxley Wood, don’t threaten any road or property and it’s highly unlikely that anyone would risk walking through in the kind of high winds which caused the accident at Stanley.
“It’s a shame that I can’t turn my chair around and look out of the window.” says Betty when we visit her in her first floor ward in the old building at Pinderfields. Sitting at the end of the bed all I can see is a strip of sky framed by one end of the vertical blinds. Inevitably the sky changes continuously as I paint and having such a limited field of view means that I can’t follow a particular cloud as it moves – morphing as it goes – from west to east.
With the tail end of a cold I’m not in the alert responsive mode that you need to keep track of changing colour and changing forms simultaneously, so I go for my ArtPen loaded with brown ArtPen ink, blotting the lines with my waterbrush for a rudimentary pen and wash effect.
which has the advantage that I can add watercolour without the ink running.
