Monthly Archives: January 2012

Is it now a painting?

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Finally got around to putting the finishing touches to this one the other evening and so wanted to get it up on the blog as soon as possible. As much as I like the final result, it’s proving difficult to decide what to say about it today other than to ask the question, “is it now a painting?”

Certainly the character of the image is completely different, the starkness of the ink drawing is replaced by a softness afforded by the colour treatment. What’s also interesting is that even though a stronger connection to reality is forged with the addition of colour, it has also brought a stronger emphasis to some of the more comic elements.

The purpose of the exercise however was not to set up some kind of competition between the two images, more to explore how colour would effect the final outcome and to get my rusty painting hand back into action. Some details proved easy and enjoyable to do whilst others remained a challenge, so there is still work to do before getting to that point where one is confident in creating what your minds eye can see, on the page in front of you. They say that in order to truly become an expert at something you must practice it for something like ten thousand hours, quite a way to go if expertise is the goal. Thankfully it is not, well not yet anyway, re-learning to play with some colour media is. So there will be more of these.

Enjoy the view.

In the pipeline.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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As mentioned previously there is a small queue of stuff which is patiently waiting to get onto the blog. It all needs scanning and fiddling with slightly to get it into the right shape to do that. This process seems to take more time than it rightfully should but, then again it’s worth making the effort to get them all looking as good as possible, even the sketches. So here are the first couple of recipients of a bit of tinkering.

This first one, above, is a half done colour version of a biro ink drawing which was originally posted back in October. That was quite a popular post, so encouraged by that and another watercolour picture which featured in September, it seemed like a good idea to see what this one would look like if given the same treatment. The base image is a scan of the original pencil sketch printed out onto a piece of plain fine grain watercolour paper. I paint straight onto this without bothering to stretch the paper or anything fancy. Filling out the detailed areas of the drawing first, the bike is then followed by the rider and finally the background. As this one is somewhat of an experiment, a black rapidograph pen (a Rotring 0,35 remember those?) was used to emphasise some of the outline stuff at this stage to see how it would look. Most of the above is done in a combination of greys. Oddly the solid block Payne’s grey in the paintbox, and the liquid Payne’s grey that comes in a tube are completely different colours, but this provides a nice choice between one which is quite blue in hue and one which is much blacker in character. I avoid using pure black as much as possible, which goes way back to being “informed” by an old tutor once that nothing in daylight is actually ever really black. Hoping to complete this very soon.

This second image is a detail of a drawing which is taking shape on the A2 Cartridge pad which spends most of its life leaning against that wall here in the micro-studio. Having talked about scribble sketching in a post before Christmas it seemed like a good idea to see if that technique could be explored a bit more and the jump up in size from A3 to A2 felt like the right thing to do. In all honesty there is a little bit of cheating going on here, there’s a very rough pencil layout underneath all the ink. Essentially though this is drawn pretty much off the cuff using my previous small sketch as a rough guide. This slightly rougher paper lends itself well to leaning the biro over almost to the point where it won’t make a mark, and scribbling away. There are some bits still to do to finish it off. Apologies if the image is a little dark around the edges but it’s too big to fit under the scanner so out came the camera. Really looking forward to finishing this one and then I can put both finished images in the gallery.

Two for One.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Welcome to 2012, it’s the new year, and here’s hoping for all of us it will turn out better than the sooth sayers suggest. The new year always brings a short period for fresh resolution and reflection. Being a serial resolution maker and breaker it helps to keep things to a minimum these days, and whilst being happier, healthier and a little wealthier are all things to work towards, it is this small blog which is the main focus for attention this year.

Viewing the newly received stats report from the guys at WordPress will be interesting but, before that’s done I know already that I want to increase my blogging output this year, be more creative and get more stuff out there. Small and obvious goals but ones which are worth noting down. Employing a slightly sideways approach to this challenge the first task at hand is to clear the decks, as it were, and bring to light some things which have been sitting here waiting for a chance to strut their stuff and be viewed. By tidying up some loose ends, particularly in respect of showing a sketch and not the subsequently finished drawing, I’m hoping to clear a bit of a backlog, physically as well as mentally. The hope is that this will free up some much needed brain space for new ideas and projects.

The drawing at the top of the post featured as an initial scribbly biro layout and then a more tidy pencil sketch waiting to be given a good inking. It follows a theme which is proving to be quite enduring, lots of healthy detail centered around the middle of the drawing, some punchy contrast areas and a kind of fish eye lens effect in the perspective. It’s one of my personal favourites and neatly treads a line between feasibility, if you drag the idea towards reality, and a cartoon if you pull it the other way towards fantasy. Again it’s done in black Bic biro on A3 Bristol paper (250 gsm) which is rapidly becoming a kind of default medium for this type of drawing.

This second drawing, completed shortly after the previous one, again has the detail and contrast areas coming through. I don’t like to comment on my drawings too much other than to discuss more technical aspects of them, preferring to leave aesthetic judgements to others. What’s important to me in looking at these is seeing whether they show any improvements in style, technique and composition, that kind of thing. How far have things come from the early days of the blog when bike related drawings were starting to be a larger part of life.

Observations, of course, tend to vary depending on mood and other variables but, today three things in particular come across. First is the quality of my sometimes wayward cross hatching. It’s getting more even, probably due to being better able to balance control and patience. Certainly the latter, as making a zillion lines can get to you after a while, and remembering to wipe the end of the pen occasionally helps too, none of those horrible little inky blobs to contend with. The second is to do with shadows and ground lines. By worrying less about crispness, and more about texture, the “hairy” and “lumpy” approaches give texture to the ground the bike is riding over through implication rather than needing to render bits of earth. A happy accident really, it wasn’t part of the original plan. The final bit is about the riders and their clobber. Folding fabrics have always been a challenge and hard to figure out no matter how many times clothes were sketched etc. All I can summise is that less is more. Fewer wrinkles and bolder shading seems to be doing the trick. All that’s needed is to repeat how it goes from one drawing to another, the habit of referencing one drawing whilst making another has yet to take root fully, but it will in time.