Autistic Animal Familiar – pen and ink

This week I drew what my own autistic animal familiar might be like. I began my drawing with some basic shapes…

Then I built on my basic shapes to make a pencil sketch…

Once this was done I set to work on my ink drawing. This was all done in bed since my pain has been ferocious recently. (I am trying to follow advice and listen to my body more and take better care of it but it has yet to show any results.) I prefer drawing at a table but “needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle” (Blackadder).

Here’s the finished ink drawing…

My thinking with this drawing and autism was…

• I made him basic shape a scawney little cat – just the sort of cat I would be. Cat’s always seem to me to be naturally autistic. It gives me a very strong sense of affinity with them. My cat Leia and I are like two peas in a Star Wars loving pod. (Yes, she loves Star Wars too because people call her name sometimes and call her a princess, but mainly because I give her treats so she will watch it with me. Lol)
• I gave him big big eyes, ears and whiskers to convey his heightened sensitivity and the way we take in all the information not just selective bits.
• The broken collar represents how so many clothes, clothing labels, jewellery etc. are intensly irritating and also how we don’t always fit so well into society.
• My creature’s tail is curved up into a golden spiral which is based on the golden ratio (which is approximately 1 to 1.61803398875). This indicates how cool patterns are for many autistic people, me included.
• I also gave my cat slightly sad comic eyes to show how it can be difficult sometimes to be autistic, especially when we have communication and social problems.

I’m going to call my autistic animal familiar “Joe“.

😊

Fire Salamander Inks and “The ugly stage”

This week’s drawing began as a doodle of some water currents. I then decided to redraw them and add a fire salamander larva (which looks a lot like an Axolotl).

Here are some process photos…

“The Ugly Stage”

The photo above captures really well how most of my artworks go through a horrible “ugly stage”. This is the point at which I start to think I am kidding myself about being an artist and I should just give it up and watch Netflix instead! As it happens with this particular drawing I was tired and asthmatic while drawing the above. I had pneumonia. My Ventolin had given me an essential tremor in my hands and for some inexplicable reason I had persevered with the inking anyway. Thankfully I stopped before I completely ruined the picture.

The next day I picked my drawing time carefully to avoid problems with my breathing and things were much easier. I tidied up a lot of the errors and began the process of trying to find creative solutions to the difficulties I’d got myself into.

Here is how the drawing turned out in my book…

Here it is close up…

One of the things I was unhappy about with this picture was that I wasn’t able to fully make the salamander larva stand out from the background. Normally I would do this by making the contrast and dark black lines strongest in the subject, but I had made the water currents really dark already so that wasn’t possible. It would also have been good to have put part of one of the water currents over the top of the animal to make him appear to be floating amongst them.

I did play around with adding some digital colour to push the subject/object contrast through colour, but in the end I think I preferred the ink drawing…

Five-Horned Rhinoceros Beetle – ink

After looking at a rhinoceros beetle last week I really wanted to make a more detailed drawing of one. I chose the Five-horned Rhinoceros Beetle (Eupatorus gracilicornis).

I started as I always do with a drawing, just sketching out the big shapes. Then I began to add some details to my sketch. Here is the complete pencil drawing…

Next I put in a thin ink outline…

As they say in Star Wars…

“Here’s where the fun begins!”

Anakin, Battle of Coruscant, “Revenge of the Sith” film

My next job was all of the actual ink rendering which I really really like doing. I find it really helps with stress. Here’s how I started the head with the full black sections…

Next I had to try to work out exactly how I wanted to render the head of the animal. I thought first of using hatched lines, but I really wasn’t sure and have been caught out with this before when I’ve used them and not liked the result. So I photocopied my drawing and tried out two different ways of doing it. Here they are side by side…

I definitiely preferred the stippled effect, so I went ahead with that. (While I was at it I also sketched out some ideas for drawing various textures on other parts of the beetle. Most of these were OK and I went ahead with them in the actual drawing.

So here is the final beetle…

The Rhino and the Lady – an experiment

I started this week’s art as an experiment. I had previously come across the plant “Honesty” (Lunaria annua) which has the most beautiful seed pods. Here’s a photo by Josef F. Stuefer from Wikipedia…

Used and resized under Creative Commons Licence (Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0))

I really like the way the seed pods have this dark line around them. I wanted to se if I could create that using watercolour without actually drawing the line.

To do this I wet the area of each pod with water, then added some strong paint. Then I added some water in the middle which tends to push the pigment out to the edges. This is how I thought I might be able to get the paint and water to make the line for me!

Here is how that turned out…

And here is a close look at how the paint behaved…

So the answer to my experiemental question is yes, I can get the paint and water to draw the line for me! However the line was not clear enough or clean enough for the picture I wanted to make.

After I’d had a cup of tea I decided to make an ink drawing over the top of this painting experiment.

So I inked a drawing over the top and then finished it by directly painting in some details to both the seed pods and the two creatures I put into the picture. One was the Five-horned Rhinoceros Beetle (Eupatorus gracilicornis) just taking flight and the other was a Common Seven-spot Ladybird (Coccinella septempunctata).

Here is the final illustration “The Rhino and the Lady”…

I find it difficult to stray from realism, so finishing this was really encouraging, since I used the shape of the plant’s seed pods but not the colour and did the same with the two beetles (although you can bearly see it with the ladybird). This painting is one of those turning points in life, were you can feel a different way of doing things growing inside.

On the realism front though I think it would be wonderful to make a pencil drawing of the seed pods and a large line and wash painting of the Rhinoceros Beetle as it unfurls it’s wings in black and white (So the only paint I would use would be black watercolour diluted down.) Of course I could experiment here and have a go at doing ink washes. I wonder how they might compare to watercolour washes?