Season’s Greetings!

 

Some Christmas Cards painted for this season…

 

The Winter Owl

The owl one was sketched in pencils and then inked with rapidograph pens on Bristol Board. After that I added some tone with Mars Lumograph pencils and scanned it into my computer.

This is the greyscale drawing…

 

Then I coloured it digitally.  This is my finished painting…

 

 

Shepherds

This was a more tradition Christmas card theme of the shepherds outside Bethlehem.  I started with a gouache background on Amazon shipping cardboard…

 

 

Then I inked on the drawing with a Sharpie. Next I painted in some hills and went over the drawing with black and then white gouache paint, giving me a final simple painting like this…

 

 

Once it was painted I cut it out and stuck it to a card using carpet tape.  I used this once years ago because I didn’t have any other double sided tape and it worked so brilliantly I’ve used it ever since.

 

Then it was finally ready to put in it’s envelope…

 

Later I decided I liked the border around the painting so I made a digital version too.  I like the idea that there’s an original painting on the first card but I also like that it’s my finished image how I wanted it on the second card.

 

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas holiday!

 

 

 

Playing around with styles

This week I’ve been quite unwell and struggling with really bad pain. I’m handling it all by resting, talking with my GP and trying to keep my mind off the pain and on other things while I wait for an appointment at a London pain clinic (UCLH). It’s quite hard to keep my mind clear of the pain at the moment though because the pain is bad enough to shut down my thinking a lot of the time. It feels like wading through very thick treacle when I try to concentrate. Audiobooks are good and my little handheld switch video game player helps too because it provides an outlet for my mind to be active without impacting my body. Art has been really difficult though. The only thing I’m able to do is short figure drawing sketches and some arty playing about on my android tablet to add to backgrounds to the sketches.

So, here are a few of the 5 minute sketches I’ve been doing…

I’ve been taking some tips and ideas from the simple exercises in this brilliant book on life drawing by Bridget Woods. (I love this book)…

Of the four sketches I did here, the one I found most interesting as an exercise, was the one on the bottom left. It is drawn entirely with curves (which was fairly easy with a curvy woman as my subject). I was amazed at how simple it was to get the lovely curvy feeling of her body down on paper using only one type of line.

Then I photographed these sketches and pulled them into my tablet for some colouring. I wanted to try out different styles and approaches. It was great because each sketch only took 5 minutes, I wasn’t worried about messing anything up which gave me a lot more freedom to really experiment with things.

The first sketch felt like it had fairly precise, careful lines. I remember as I drew this particular girl I fell into this absorbed but relaxed state. It was beautiful – almost like the drawing was drawing itself. Consequently when I came to add colour and tone to the sketch I painted her with sections of flat colour and then made the background by overlapping blocks of pastel colours in simple triangles and quadrilaterals. Then, remembering the lessons I learned from the Art Prof team on YouTube, I made some changes to the way I framed the portrait to give it a kick of the alternative.

Here it is…

The second sketch I chose to colour was really tiny. This made the lines look rough but natural looking. So I followed that theme and put my dancer into a naturalistic rough pastel world…

The aspect of this one I like most is actually the rough dark green border which I drew by hand.

Then I went on to my favourite of the sketches – the one drawn only with curved lines. I coloured the main shape of my figure one colour and then gave the background another colour. Then every other bit of shading and colouring (apart from her hair) was done with circles. This was such good fun.

Here’s the final result…

While none of these are proper art projects, they work well as little thumbnails which can, perhaps, point me to fuller, more complete pieces, later on. I did enjoy an enormous sense of freedom and creativity working on something I knew wasn’t going to become a finished piece later on.

Monster Fish

I’ve really been missing fishing in the last year. So I had a little bit of imaginary fun this week drawing a monster fish.

I based this creation on a real monster fish I saw caught on YouTube. Here’s a still from the video…

The fish is a big old Lingcod. If you fancy watching a family doing some great fishing here is a link to the video from The Fishing Doctors Adventures channel.

I took the basic fish shape with that huge head from the Lingcod and then played around with it, adding spikes onto his back and an angler fish type lure onto his head. Here are some process photos…

After I got to this stage I finished it off digitally playing with the highlights and shadows and adding a castshadow…

If I ever pulled this one out of the river I think I’d be a bit shocked, even if I were spinning for pike and perch! I think I’ll call him Jerry.

Dormouse – Ink and Staedtler Mars Lumograph Pencils

This week I used my Rapidograph ink pens and some new pencils. They are made by Staedtler and are particularly black. They also have much less shine compared to normal graphite pencils which burnish really easily. Staedtler call them Mars Lumograph Black

Previously I have added midtone to ink drawings using a wash of ink and water. It can be done like this quite effectively but to get a nice gradient it’s much easier to use pencils. The problem with pencils is that the graphite easily burnishes to a bright shine which makes them difficult to photograph. When I saw these pencils I thought I would see if they solved the problem.

Here are some process photos…

I made an initial sketch using a range of different references. I used three reference photo’s for the mouse, 2 photos for his or her home and a range of photos for the Blackberry bushes.

Once my sketch was complete I inked the outline (above).

In the next photo you can see where I started adding some shading using the new pencils. Using them felt more like using a black coloured pencil, but, unlike regular coloured pencils, I found I could easily erase my marks…

Once the shading was done I sprayed my picture with fixative and then began to ink over the top…

At this point I took a step back to evaluate how I wanted to move forward. I was thinking about blacking out all of the white areas of the paper, but I felt unsure about whether this would work visually so I tried it out digitally first. I photographed my picture and pulled it into Autodesk Sketchbook and had a play…

Above is the scanned drawing and below is a very rough rendering of what it might look like if I coloured all of my background black…

I could immediately see that having a black background gave me some really good contrast but it was at the expense of being able to have any sense of depth in the drawing. So I tried to see what it might be like with some mid-toned leaves behind the leaves I originally drew in ink…

This didn’t feel right to me but after playing around with it some more I came up with this…

If I put some light mid-tone leaves with less detail behind the main drawing I could get the feeling of depth and the image began to feel right.

So I put some leaves in using traditional graphite pencils, edged them very minimally with a thin pen and then sprayed the image again with fixative. Once that was dry I then went over the whole image again with ink putting in detail to my heart’s content! (It was bliss!)

Here’s my finished drawing…

I think the new pencils worked well with ink – I had no trouble getting them dark enough and no issues with the ink and pencils affecting how well the marks stayed on the page. I did have some minimal issues with my paper. Where I had worked the paper quite hard the rapidograph pens started to break the surface down. However I drew this picture in a cheap A4 sketchbook which only had 160gsm paper. I think more detailed drawing like this might need a more robust paper.

It was a fun exercise. I will do some more experimentation with these new pencils in the future.