Julian and the big Green Meanie.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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JW_photo

Firstly, a very happy New Year to all of my readers and followers, may 2015 be a great year for all of you. Here at Soulcraftcandy I’m hoping for a year full of interesting drawing projects to grapple with, some new adventures featuring some new materials and obviously, a whole host of new fans and followers. Not too much to ask for then! So let’s kick off the new year with a story featuring a very old friend, a big green machine and a triumph of physics over human ambition.

The friend in question is Julian, a lovely former wild boy I have had the pleasure of knowing for over forty years. Once a hard core bike rider, his various exploits deserve a blog all of their own, now a responsible dad. Having said that, he has never really lost the bug and as we speak is preparing himself for an off road rally trip over on the Baja peninsula. Watch out Mexico. Back in the day, Julian was the first person I knew who fully embraced the modern sports bike and the newly (at the time) burgeoning cult of the public track day, a barely veiled excuse for Joe Public to go ballistic on his road bike within the controlled confines of a proper race track. Needless to say at one such event our man came a cropper.

Julian has always been interested in my pictures and finally got around to asking me to do a commission for him. It goes without saying that his choice of subject is poignant, being a depiction of him aboard that sports bike on the fateful day he badly broke his ankle and hung up his leathers for a while.

Here’s the photograph, above, he supplied as reference and as you can see it’s not in the best condition or particularly in focus, but that’s not too much of a problem, there is more than enough information here to get going. I wanted to base the picture on this view rather than create a new one, but just tweak it here and there as it’s a great image to start with.

JW_First_trace©JonTremlett2015

The first step is to get the photo into my painter program where I can trace over it in digital pencil to establish some outlines to work with. This initial process also helps to embed some knowledge of the subject into my head so I can start to think about which bits I want to change moving forward. I’m still too much in love with hand techniques to go fully digital with a painting yet but, I’m sure one day soon it will happen. Though when you do that all you get is a print of your artwork, not the actual artwork itself, which is a very different outcome.

JW_Blue©JonTremlett2015

Using the printed trace as an underlay, it’s then onto the light box for another tracing exercise where I can start to move parts of the drawing around, like changing the position of the rider, and playing with the proportions of some details very slightly to gain extra emphasis here and there. Working with the blue biro helps me to see one drawing clearly over the top of the other. You’ll see I’ve shifted him off the seat a bit and given him a more heroic “knee down” stance to get some added dynamism into the picture.

JW_Pencil©JonTremlett2015

This third stage is the final pencil outline drawing on to the water colour paper I’ll use for the painting itself. Again, working on the light box, I trace off the blue biro drawing, tightening details as I go but only putting in the lines that I really will need to rely on. An H or 2H pencil is best for this bit, and light pressure so that it doesn’t leave grooves in the paper surface. All this redrawing might seem rather time consuming but it means I don’t have to worry too much about moving a line or erasing things, both of which will only damage the surface of the water colour paper. Once this is complete I soak the paper and stretch it onto a wooden board in readiness for taking the paint washes. Through experimenting I’ve found that it doesn’t distort the drawing in any way if you stretch the paper after putting the image on it, the secret is just to be patient and resist scrubbing and dabbing the paper too much during the process.

JW_Paint1©JonTremlett2015

When the paper is fully dry it’s time for the first layers of wash. Here I’m using a combination of cake based watercolours, some from tubes and intense liquid watercolours. For colours such as the characteristic Kawasaki green the liquid colours are brilliant. They both lift the image off the page and give it real punchiness. In combination with something like Payne’s Grey one can achieve some lovely transitions from light to dark and some really intense shadow areas. I love them though it pays to exercise caution as a little colour goes a long way and it stains the paper unlike the more “floating” colours.

The next post should see it completed and I’ll take that opportunity to cover more details of the process. So watch this space, it will be here very soon.

It’s been a long time coming.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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"Catch me if you can", a biro drawing by Jon Tremlett for Soulcraftcandy.

Finally, finally, finally, today it’s time to reveal the latest finished drawing. For now it’s called “Catch me if you can”, and I think it will probably stay that way. This one has taken rather a long time to complete, though I’m hoping you’ll see why and understand my excitement at seeing it done. As I’ve mentioned before it is inspired by an idea thrown at me by Steve Carpenter over in California, a nod to the underlying disregard for authority and convention that underpins our shared love of motorcycles and what we do with them. Having said that I would add that this is by no means meant to celebrate bad behaviour or law breaking (much).

As with some of my previous drawings this one is drawn using a yellow barrelled fine tipped Bic biro (c’mon guys where’s that sponsorship ;D) on 250gsm Bristol Board at A3 size. For some reason, and I think it might have something to do with not having done a biro drawing for a while, I approached this with a level of conscientiousness that I found quite surprising. Hence the time it’s taken to finish. I even got to the point of wrapping tape around the barrel of the pen to remind me where I needed to hold it to get a particular line weight and thickness. They say that God lives in the details, and perhaps that’s where He is in this one, not in the picture but in the bit of blue tape wrapped around my pen?

For much of its gestation the picture was just the bike and the pursuing police car but, following what I did on the V-Bob picture recently, see the post here, I decided to put in some street scene to provide some context and stuff. I think it works quite well. Aside from the cartoon nature of the depiction, like the hand gesture and the light flying off the car roof, the street scene offers the perfect opportunity to inject a little bit of extra humour into the composition. It’s something I’ll be working on more in future, it appeals to my sense of the ridiculous. I’ve been wandering around my neighbourhood here in Ealing taking lots of pictures of local shops, pubs and buildings so that I can build a little reference archive to use for future inspiration.

As usual I’ve put this up as a low resolution image, so apologies if you’re struggling to see the detail. Please feel free to share it but, I would ask that you don’t use it for any other purpose for the time being. Much obliged and thanks for dropping by today, I hope you enjoyed it.

Here are some details from the drawing for you.

Details of "Catch me if you can" by Jon Tremlett ©2014.

Don’t rush it, you’ll finish it soon enough.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Biro drawing by Jon Tremlett for Soulcraftcandy.

So here’s a progress update on the biro ink drawing I’m working on at the moment. It’s coming along really well though it is taking quite a long time to complete. The thing is, you reach a point in a drawing where you really start to see how it will turn out, and inspired by this you open yourself to  an internal pressure to get it finished. This can be a good thing, you are energised to put in the effort but, it can also be a bad thing because if you’re not careful you rush things, and when that happens you make mistakes. Although it can often be a little frustrating at times it is always better for me in these situations to take a deep breath, take frequent breaks to take stock of the marks I’m making on the paper and accept the fact that slow is good, and that I’ll get to the end, one small step at a time. I’m having to be extra mindful with this one too. It is not a commission but a work based around a request, and the last thing I want to do is muck it up. I want it to be the best one I’ve done so far and as a result my internal pressure gauge is already off the scale!

Catch_me_detailJonTremlett2014

From this detail shot you can see I hope, how much pen work goes into these things, so you get an understanding of how important it is for me not to make mistakes. I spend a lot of time scribbling on a separate sheet to get the pen running right and my hand steady (I have a natural shakiness at close range). There’s a discipline to cross hatching, getting the tone and line direction consistent which requires huge concentration. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, the angle of the pen gives too much black or the pressure you’re using is too firm and at times like this you just have to step back, scribble on a loose sheet until you’re happy and then come back to it. No one ever said this was easy, so I try not to think that. In essence the greater the effort the greater the reward. Let’s see how I cope with the rest of it.