This week’s art is a simple ink drawing of a robin…
Recently I’ve been thinking more about the placement of my artwork on the page. So rather than going with the more standard central placement I pushed my little robin off to the right so that he was looking into some space on the left. It’s a small thing but I really like it.
This week’s art is a very quick sketch of a Red Kite. Last summer I saw this bird all the time. It was magnificent. This summer though I saw one just once. I miss it’s amazing presence.
Here’s the sketch…
The male Magnificent Frigatebird is a beautiful bird with a vivid red gular sac used to attract a mate.
Below is a photograph by Andrew Turner (CC BY 2.0) of such a male…
I made an ink and pencil drawing of one here…
Then I added the red of his gular sac digitally. Here’s the finished art…
I think, although the red is very striking, I prefer the black and white ink and pencil drawing to it’s mixed media brother. Which do you prefer?
In my final week of experimentation with ink I played around with splattering ink and dropping ink to paint some trees and a crow.
For the trees I painted a big wet blob on the paper with clean water. I let it sink in and then I painted it again to make sure it was really wet. Then I dropped quite a few drops of ink into the little pool that I had made. I then did the same thing again for each additional tree. I tried really hard not to disturb the ink/water mixture. Eventually I put the painting high up on top of my printer where Leia (my cat) couldn’t get to it and left it to dry naturally. This took all day! I did get some excellent patterns in the ink.
Once it was dry I painted on the tree trunks and the ground. Here’s the final picture…
The last painting I did was of a crow. I drew all of the crow except his wings in ink pen (Pigma microns and a thin, flexible tipped cartridge pen). Then I dropped a big pool of ink and blew it across the page. It really took some courage to do that since in one breath I might have ruined the whole painting! Then, when the first wing was dry I put another smaller blob of ink on the paper and blew it again for the second wing. Finally I went back into the drawing and tried to join up the wings and body more smoothly. Here’s the last picture…
I quite like this one. I do love crows generally and the ink splatter makes this crow look particularly scruffy! It reminds me of a one legged crow I met many years ago in a municipal garden next to a shopping centre. I was eating bread pudding and this intensely scruffy one legged crow hopped next to me for 200 yards. He was quite clearly begging for some bread pudding. I gave in and shared my food with him. He was extra friendly.
This week I painted a picture of a really odd-looking bird. It’s called a Shoebill (Balaeniceps rex), because, unsurprisingly, it’s bill looks a bit like a shoe. I think it looks more like a clog. I wonder if Clogbeak will catch on? 😊
I used the Line and Wash method of painting for this picture. Basically it is a mixture of an inked line drawing painted over with watercolours. (Although I have seen people paint watercolour pictures and then add the ink lines later which is interesting.)
Here is a beautiful photograph of one of these birds. I absolutely love the feather definition the photographer has picked up on the back of the bird. The photo is by Hans Hillewaert.
Here are some process photos of the drawing process…
Here is my ink drawing…
Once my ink drawing was complete I then set about painting. I began with a pale yellow wash over the background area. While the wash was still wet I dropped into it some Cadmium yellow deep (which is a gorgeous colour). I also played around with removing some of the colour in places with a paper towel so I could have a nice textured background.
Next I painted all of the bird apart from his eyes and bill with a very light Paynes Grey with a little French Ultramarine to make it a little more blue. I gradually built up my depth of colour and depth of tone in the darker areas.
Once that was done I painted his eyes and then his amazing clog-like bill. I finished off using some titanium white with a really small rigger brush to put in some highlighted feathers and some eye-shine.
Here is my final painting…
I think they’re really funny birds. As well as having a significant bite, they also clatter their beak when greeting a friend and bow and shake their head to show affection!
Here’s a YouTube video which shows a female Shoebill clattering her beak and greeting her favourite keeper with bows and head shakes. It’s a lovely video! (The clattering starts at about 1 minute 20 seconds and the bowing and head shaking happens shortly afterwards.)
Disgustingly, they also defecate on their own legs to cool down when they’re too hot. I don’t know if I would ever be hot enough to do that! They are also, very sadly, classed as a vulnerable as a species with only 5000 to 8000 left in the wild. This is partly due to the black market for their bodies (despite them being a protected species on CITES) and partly due to habitat destruction in their central African home due to farming and burning of the land.
This week’s art began as a doodle of a peacock on some copy paper…
I scanned the sketch and pulled it into Autodesk Sketchbook. Then I reset the drawing colour to a light blue so that I could redraw over it digitally…
I find this kind of drawing very relaxing and did most of this while watching some the excellent new(ish) series of Star Trek Discovery (which is awesome!!!)
Here’s the doodle redrawn digitally. You can see that I used two different line weights. To keep a track of this while I’m working I draw a little sample of each line weight I’m using and then write the size next to it. This means I can make changes at the correct weight without having to guess…
Next I added some fanciful swirls to his lovely tail…
Finally I added some colour and then colour balanced and finalised the image in Photoshop…
I do really love herons! I know they are the bane of many Koi enthusiasts due to their tendency to snack on much loved fish but they do have a certain predatory beauty. This week I drew an ink drawing of a heron and toned it with smudged pencil. I am continuing to work on integrating my textural studies into actual artwork.
Here is my rough pencil sketch…
This shot was taken once I’d refined my pencil work…
This was taken in the middle of inking the drawing…
Here is the completed picture…
Once I had my inks finished I felt I really needed some greyscale tones to help give the viewer the feeling of looking at water. Previously I’ve either done this digitally or with a range of grey brush markers. For this drawing though, I really wanted to add some smooth grey gradients so I decided to mix up my media a little and use pencil for this. Rather than drawing the graphite onto the paper I used the graphite shavings from a mechanical pencil sharpener…
…and rubbed them on with a tissue. I had to practise this technique on some scrap paper a few times but I found I could get a lovely smooth gradient this way. Then I use my putty eraser and a fine mechanical eraser to remove the shading from the places where it went over a line. I am really pleased with how this turned out. I will use this technique again.
Reviewing this particular picture, I can see that my textures are very gradually improving. I would still like to develop more range and finesse with this. I am also quite pleased with the way the water ripples around the heron’s feet read. I think the smooth gradients really help this effect.
I also keep wondering if I should have added some indications of lanscape in the top left corner. It might look good to see a vague sense of a horizon line. Just a few marks to give the viewer an indication. At the time, I refrained from doing so because I liked the striking outline of the heron’s head and I thought putting in some landscape would detract from that. Sometimes drawings seem to ask for a change but I don’t always know exactly how to handle it. In the end I decided to leave it and just sit with the picture as it is. Sometimes, when doing this my unconscious mind seems to keep working ont eh problem in the background and days or even a few weeks later I figure out the answer.
A while back I made a some bookmarks for my own use. (I am always in need of these. If I don’t make some I end up using old envelopes and other bits of tat.) During the lockdown I have managed to find even more need for booksmarks than usual.
I often have three or four books/comicbooks on the go at any one time, but I realised that, at the moment, I have 15 books on the go…
Star Wars Heroes and Villains (above) is a set of short stories so I count these four books as one since they are a series. (In fact there are six books in the series as a whole but I finished the previous two ages ago.) I’m doing the same with Autumnlands and Middlewest because they are both collected editions of ongoing comicbook series and it’s still up to 15!
I’m afraid I don’t have process photos for my booksmarks, but I do have a high quality image which you are free to download to help with your lockdown reading needs. All four bookmarks are on one sheet which should print landscape A4. Each bookmark has a slightly wider border on the right hand side to allow for space to cut them apart from one another.
To download click here to go to the full size image, then right click the image and use “save image as”.
(Creative Commons Copyright information for this image is at the bottom of this post. Basically anyone is free to use and copy this image for non commercial purposes.)
Here are the individual bookmarks…
I hope you enjoy them!
PS: I wrote this post a few weeks ago. I am now having some difficulties with my breathing. No need to worry, my Doc thinks it’s a regular chest infection (possibly a complication from a procedure I had done in March) rather than Covid. But if the next round of antibiotics and steroids doesn’t fix it, or if my breathing gets worse, I might have to go into hospital. So I apologise in advance if I don’t respond to comments etc. I think it will all be OK in the end. I just can’t wait to get back to regular traditional drawing and painting!
Copyright Info – Normally I hold all rights reserved on the copyright for all images on this site (unless explicitly stated otherwise when they belong to someone else). I also limit the size of the images I post to reduce the risk of copyright infringement. However I have given the image linked above a Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) and uploaded it at full size. Licence details below…
Although this post will be published in Mid March, I am actually writing it during the half term holidays in the middle of February. This half term I have been recovering from an illness which took me to hospital last week and looking after my son who has had an operation a few days ago. So, rather than being out and about, I have spent a lot of time relaxing indoors and looking after my lad who is doing very well. While surfing the web I stumbled across a series of Japanese woodblock prints. I have always loved The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai.
Here is a link from Wikipedia:
But I have never made a serious study of the art-form – until now! I have been blown away by the simplicity and beauty of this kind of art.
Woodblock printing originally came to Japan from China in the 8th century CE and for a long time was only used for printing the written word – mainly Buddhist texts. Then in 1765, right in the middle of the Edo period, a new style of polychromatic woodblock printing was invented called Nishiki-e. At first they printed beautiful calendars with this method but the technique was soon taken up by ‘Floating World’ artists and so Ukiyo-e was born. Ukiyo-e is printed art which centres on the fleeting and ephemeral nature of ordinary life. It began featuring the goings on in the urban pleasure districts during the Edo period – beautiful women, geishas and teahouse mistresses, kabuki theatre, warriors and sumo wrestlers. Later the subject matter broadened out to include landscapes, travel scenes, scenes involving people doing ordinary jobs, natural scenes of animals and plants and much more. I have only really touched upon the surface of the subject so far but here are my favourites at this stage:
The last two of these artists are from the Shin Hanga movement which began in about 1910. It was really a revival of the original woodblock printing with some modern influences. (Shin Hanga means “New Prints”.)
Of course, having been blown away by this artwork I wanted to have a go myself. My aim was not to make my own woodblock prints but to create watercolour and gouache paintings which have a similar look and feel. I suspect this is something that I will have to learn as I work on it.
The first painting I had a try at was a natural scene of a bird with some cherry blossom by a late 19th century / early 20th century artist called Ohara Koson…
I made this painting as a present for a family member’s birthday…
I made a graded wash going from the centre outwards with more cadmium yellow deep as I got towards the edge. Then I painted the bird and the flowers on with watercolours. I wasn’t sure from the original what bird species it was so my interpretation is a little fanciful (sort of a red version of a blue tit).
While I was at the hospital waiting for my son to be discharged I made a sketch in pencil of the next subject I wanted to have a go at. Here’s the original art by Kawase…
Here’s my interpretation as a sketch…
And here is my watercolour impression of Kawase’s work…
I used a basic graded wash over my pencil outline and then painted the features on with gouache. I am pleased with how both of these paintings turned out as initial studies, but I would like to work some more on this to see how far I can take it and what that ends up looking like.
jo fox - adventures in art 