Category Archives: Cafe Racers

Bending the rules, just a little.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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82_Wheelie_1

Todays stunt, the Wheelie. As much as they are displays of machine control and skill, they are also a perfect expression of the utterly boyish exuberance and confidence that infects us when we’re out on our bikes. It’s a lot of fun to depict them in images, though capturing that moment, like a camera snapshot, presents its own challenges. If you drew up some kind of list of all the variables one could consider before putting pen to paper, you would probably never start. For me the essence lies in capturing that sense of fun and confidence such a display gives off. It is after all, nothing more than showing off to an audience, so trying to get that into the picture is important. It would be far simpler to draw the whole thing as a straight elevational view but that would be too easy. Like a camera lens your eye can be a pretty wide angle device, and so creating a sense of depth and perspective is the main challenge. Which part of the image is almost flat to the viewer, and at what angle does one see the rest of the subject are aspects that present an interesting challenge when drawing from imagination. Too little and things look rather flat, too much and you get a kind of fish eye effect that turns the subject into a kind of banana. In perspective terms these are not perfect depictions but I hope they do enough to convey the idea. Cartoons invariably bend the rules a bit, but I think you can get away with it when you admit that that is exactly what you’re creating.

 

This one is Wheelie 1, and yes, that means there is another one coming along shortly. I hope you enjoyed it.

 

A new picture and an inspiring book.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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81_FlyBy_2

This is the second version of FlyBy. There wasn’t anything wrong with the first one, it just seemed like a good idea to do another one, and bring in some more of the classic cafe racer details like a black leather jacket with patches on and a big silver tank on the bike.

 

The background got really patchy on this one but once it had dried out fully it didn’t seem too bad after all. The colour works really well with the bike image and it would have been foolhardy to think that it could be rescued or changed in any way by adding more liquid. I’m really pleased with the reflections on the exhaust and the engine side cover, I confess I referred to some photographs to truly try and get a handle on these parts. There is certainly a “way” of doing these things, and it is reliant on being able to pick the information  you want from a photo as it is in being able to access ones embedded knowledge. The former certainly feeds the latter, the photos serving purely to inform what I’m doing rather than be representative of the only way things can be rendered. More of these to come.

This is a great book.

This is a great book.

On another note today, here’s a really great book to recommend. It’s called “An Illustrated Life” by a chap called Danny Gregory. Essentially it is a collection of features on various creative people and their sketchbooks, including he author, though the books are very much the heroes. It is a fascinating look into other worlds where the books are used as journals for recording everyday life, through to how various artists use them as repositories for ideas and laboratories for creative experimentation. To accompany all of this visual candy there is also plenty to read, each featured person is given plenty of column inches to explain what they use their books for, how they do it and, just as importantly, why they do what they do. It is all very enlightening and interesting stuff, I can’t recommend it enough as a source of energy, inspiration and delight. For any of us who spend any time slowly filling sketchbooks all this might at first seem a bit intimidating, but go with it and it soon becomes clear that we are all doing the same thing, just differently and individually. It’s readily available through all the usual channels. Here’s a link: To the book.

Illustrated_Life2 Illustrated_Life3 Illustrated_Life4

 

 

Another stunt.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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80_FlyBy_1

It’s good to have some kind of working titles for sketches and drawings if for no other reason to enable you to find stuff as you file it all away in some hard drive somewhere having scanned it. My trick cycling cafe racers are now the Cafe Stunts series, no point being too elaborate about it.

 

This is the second one, which goes by the name of “FlyBy 1”, which means there’s a second one on its way. I’m doing these at a small scale, the colour block on this one is only 200mm, or 8 inches, across on a sheet of A4 Bristol Board. It’s quite a challenge to keep the detail level where you want it, and in order to make life a bit easier for myself I’m applying washes and subsequent inking at various stages so I can keep track of all the fiddly bits. This builds the image in stages. I wanted backgrounds that didn’t contain any detail so they act as a real counterpoint to the detail of the drawing and help lift it off the page. Big areas are tricky to fill evenly on this paper, but for me the resulting patchiness of the colour helps to reinforce the hand made nature of the images. Some of the liquid colours I’ve got here work well in this mode and others really don’t, so most of the backgrounds are at the red/brown part of the spectrum. They seem to work well with the chrome elements too. I hope you like it.