Goliath Beetle

This week I drew a Goliath Beetle (Goliathus cacicus) on toned paper.  They are amazing animals.  Some are as big as an adult human hand!

Some have gorgeous russet brown elytra (wing covers), like this one above.  Others have amazing patterns like the one below…

They are native to West Africa and feed on fruit and tree sap. 

I drew my beetle in the usual way – starting with pencils and then adding ink and white gouache. Here are the pencils…

Once the ink and gouache were done I photographed it and pulled it into photoshop. I added a dropped shadow to make it seem like it is sitting on top of the paper. Here is the final picture…

Figure Drawing

This week I drew a figure from the brilliant animated Star Trek show “Prodigy”. I also worked on some fairly quick life drawings. I used a website called Quickposes which is really useful for this. These were done in 120 seconds…

This was done in 120 seconds too apart from the hair which I added afterwards…

I’ve worked on a number of methods for figure drawing but I find what works best is a mixture of two methods.

• The first is the method I use with every drawing of any kind – shapes. I simply draw the shapes I see, simplifying them at first and then putting in the finer details of the shape later. I start with the biggest shapes I can see and then fill in the details with smaller and smaller shapes. I really like this method because it works for drawing anything.

• The second method which really helps me is a way of looking at figures before drawing them. I look for certain markers to help me. First I look for the head, chest and pelvis. I try to see the size placement and angles between them. Then I look at the shoulder girdle and the pelvic girdle and look at the way they show me where the roots of the limbs are. The rest just follows naturally.

Here is a figure drawing which took about 15 minutes. It’s Dal from Star Trek Prodigy. My drawing…

…and Dal himself…

Cicada

I first drew this cicada when I was doing a pen and ink exercise where you draw something without lifting your pen up from the paper. It was a small quick little sketch…

I quite liked the shape of it so I drew it again at a larger size on some A4 paper. Then I had a quick go at painting it. I got the colours all wrong – they just didn’t work out the way they had in my head before I painted them. Here’s how it turned out…

At first I gave up on it but then a few weeks later I decided to see what I could do with it in photoshop.

First I got rid of the reds and oranges which had plagued the original. I made these neutral at first and then decided to make them cyan. Then I played around with my lighting, manually pushing the contrast to make the image a bit stronger.

After that I made a background on my tablet using Autodesk Sketchbook (because it has some great brushes) and then exported the image from there and fed it into Photoshop.

Then I balanced the colours of my background, desaturating it a little to push the main subject forward and added a shadow.

This is how it turned out…

Electric Dreams – Ink and graphite on paper

This drawing began life as a simple portrait of the Scottish actor Ian Hanmore who played a monk in Amazon’s Carnival Row. He played his character beautifully. There was this moment when he was just looking off into the middle distance and it really captured my heart. So I paused the playback and photographed my TV. Then I began working on what I thought would be a simple portrait.

Here’s the photo I took of the moment which really caught me from the series…

And here are some process shots of this portrait taking shape…

Then I got the idea to make him into an android. I’m not sure why – I just thought it would look cool. So I added some cybernetic parts to him and then inked the whole picture.

Here is the final drawing…

I added a quote from the first Bladerunner film because the character’s thoughtfulness reminded me quite strongly of the words the last replicant, Roy Baty, spoke before he died.

That said, he also reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Electric Monk – a labour saving device designed to believe things for you to save you the trouble.

The Koi Pond

This image was painted in watercolour and gouache and is A4 in size.

Sometimes in ponds there are rings of algae which build up around the edges. The algae rings make the most beautiful patterns. I used gouache, laid down as flat colour, to represent the algae and wet in wet watercolour to represent the clear water. Although this was abstracted to some extent I tried to keep the natural algal patterns in the picture.

Here’s a close-up of the image…

The Rhino, the Avocet and the Cat

Following my mum passing away I haven’t made any art. Here are two quick sketches I made a few weeks ago – a Rhino and an Avocet…

In order to photograph these, and other, pictures I got out my photo box. It turns out that it is the perfect size for my cat. In fact I think, she thinks, it’s made for her…

The box clearly passed inspection leaving me with a very contented kitty cat…

Sad News

Sadly, after a long illness, my Mum passed away. I have no words.

Whale Shark – Watercolour

This week’s painting is of a Whale Shark. Rather than my usual attempts at realism I decided to let thing become a little more imaginative.

I began with a straightforward pencil line drawing…

Once I was ready to paint I needed to give some thought to my colour palette and to the textures I wanted to paint with. With the colours I fairly quickly decided that I wanted browns yellows and blues but how I wanted to position these colours took some time to work out.

For the shark, I pushed the natural soft brown of the whale shark towards a richer redder brown which I liked and then tried putting some ultramarine in the shadows of the brown which also had a nice subtle effect. Then I tried to work out if I wanted a sand colour as the main background or a blue. I went for the sand in the end and decided to still include the blue in the background items of the picture.

Here is how I worked out my basic colour plan…

Then I went on to look at the textures I wanted. I thought it would be good to use the textural patterns salt makes on drying paint for either the whale or the sand. I played around with both and decided on the sand. I also looked at how I wanted to incorporate the whale shark’s spots in my painting. Here are the texture and patterns tests I made before painting…

Once I had these things worked out in my head I was ready to paint. This took quite a few days as my anxiety is very high at the moment. (In fact I was only able to paint this when I had an idea for the next painting and found that finishing this one was getting in the way. I’ve never had anxiety like this before – it’s paralysing and makes me feel really sick.)

I began with the background. I painted it with yellow ochre, yellow and some orange. Then I added salt when it was still very damp but not swimming in water…

Next I painted an underpainting of the whale shark using burnt umber, crimson and ultramarine…

I quite like the way this colour combination worked together. I think if I painted this again I would try to work more of this into the final painting.

Once this was done I painted over the whale with more of the same colours trying to give the whale some deep rich colours. I added titanium white for the spots and then painted the objects in the back ground. I tried to keep the background objects paler so that the viewers eye is still drawn by the whale first.

Here is the final image…

Iguana – Ink and pencil

I have a real thing for iguanas. They are such interesting animals with a beautiful form and great character. This is a drawing I made of one whilst I was at an art club run by MIND. I sketched it in pencil first and then drew in my details in ink. Here is a process photo I took about half way through…

Once the main body of the animal was done I decided to make the drawing more graphical. Initially I wanted to make the background black so I added a thick black outline to the animal as a way to get the detailed areas black before painting in the rest of the black with a brush and ink later. However I really liked the way the line looked so I added a line around the outside too of around the same thickness and left the rest of the background white. Here’s how it turned out…