Category Archives: Colour

A change of scale.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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It is most likely true that if you asked any creative person who produces stuff, if they just worked on one thing at a time, in a beautifully seamless procession of sequential order, they would likely say they did not. It seems to be in our nature to have as many things in the pipeline as we can manage, and then more. Our work spaces are doubtless littered with bits and pieces which remain unfinished, partially forgotten and “in development”. Our ability to accumulate projects is often quite astounding, and that’s before you even start talking about what’s in the brain bank, the unseen material hidden in the grey matter.

This is very much the case at Soulcraftcandy Mansions. Both the brain bank and endless pages of notebooks are filled with things that might be, one day. Sketches, doodles and diagrams all waiting patiently to be given life through some creative expression.

One such idea has been receiving such attention this week, small drawings in series. With the bigger drawings churning away nicely it was time to look at another idea for a while, to give my creativity a rest by way of a change of scale, pace and medium. Small drawings have always held my attention and this goes way back to when to being in a design studio and a winning idea would first appear in the corner of a page as a little thumbnail sketch. Of course the same thing happens these days but I’m now just as interested in the drawing as the idea it expresses.

The former situation would require enlarging the sketch and then investigating its potential as a design. Now the process is kind of reversed, rather than adding detail to the original sketch the process is reductive, what can be left out. The drop in scale really makes you think about what is the minimum required to get what you’re after. How do you compress all the complexity, mechanisms and complicated forms into a small space. Comic artists are consummate masters of this discipline. The hope is that it will refresh an appreciation for the details when returning to a larger format, but that might be hoping for too much.

Some might be tempted to sidestep this issue of detail by simply scaling down an already scanned drawing in Photoshop and printing it out, but that only gives you little dense balls of ink and not much else. So the idea was to draw as close to the required scale as possible to start with. Then, in the same way that we used to play with the photocopier all those years ago, it’s a question of cleaning up the image and changing the size until you’ve got something workable. Scanning, cleaning out unwanted lines, knocking back saturation levels and printing until I’m happy. Four of these images get gathered together and printed out in a 2×2 matrix on A4.

The old Epson A3 printer that’s sat here stopped doing beautiful ages ago but has a great ability for handling all manner of different kinds and weights of paper which my newer Canon is not that interested in doing.

This facility means that it’s also easy now to play with differing media on these different papers and, to play around with different colour combinations for the images. Colour crayons, inks and paints will all get a look in. So far it’s the crayons that have held my attention and the results are promising though there is certainly room for improvement. I’m using Derwent Studio crayons by Rexel Cumberland and they have a lovely soft waxiness to them, but they don’t stay sharp for long and laying on deep colour often requires you to labour them a bit. The paper too, is a bit coarse but picks up colour well so it will be a case of finding the right balance between these two attributes in order to get the desired level of intensity.

There are some liquid water colours ( Dr Ph Martin’s)sitting in a box on the shelf here. It will be interesting to see how they work on some fine surfaced water colour paper in the next experiment.

Pop! And it’s gone.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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The bulging pile of paper sheets sitting on various shelves in my small studio room are testament to the hard learned (many years ago I might add) lesson that for every stack of ideas one might have, only a very few ever really make it out into the world in a finished form that we the creators are fully happy with. In the commercial design environment where I used to spend much of my time this is certainly the case and the reason why the search for a new industrial design for a mobile phone, for example, starts with hundreds of design sketches. Only after a protracted process of editing, refinement, lots of trips round an iterative loop and endless testing is the final design isolated.

 

What’s the point of the above? Well, I suppose it’s a comment on ones ability to accept that no matter what you might think there is still a very strong reason why iterative exercises and endless failures must remain a fundamental part of any personal creative undertaking. Personally, I like it when things don’t go quite right. It makes me refocus on what I’m doing and forces me to analyse why it didn’t work in an effort to learn something new and move forward.

 

This is what’s happening with this colour sketch above. I knew I had to put some kind of background in. I thought I’d try and keep it simple. I had a funny feeling it wasn’t working before I’d finished but, I carried on, and I think mainly to see if it would turn out as bad as I’d suspected. I think it did. I will probably find ten things wrong with it if I think long and hard about it. But I don’t feel the need to do that as the thing that hits me first is that it kills the drawing. It’s taken any and all of the “pop” away from the core image and drowned it in a sea of mid-toned dullness. ‘Pop’ is the word I use to describe in very simple terms an images ability to jump out of the page at you. The colour drawing in the previous post has it and many of the black and white drawings have it too. For me it’s about contrasts. Tonal contrasts across a drawing and between foreground and background. And intensities, particularly when using colour, again between foreground and background.

 

In theory I should know better, I’ve been making images for long enough to balance these things instinctively but, it doesn’t always work like that, so moments like this are always useful because they force me to step back from the work and consider carefully what I’m actually doing.

 

I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do with it. I could use it as the basis for a good fiddle in Photoshop just to play with tonal values quickly or I may take the opportunity to recolour another print and find that missing pop.

 

Going with the flow.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Some years ago I was engaged in a process of attempting to understand creative acts and my own creativity in particular. This was brought about by a need to find out more about what made me tick. Like many creative people I’m sure, I’ve often found myself wondering what exactly it was that I was good at why being unsure about it was making working life quite confusing and unrewarding. Coincidentally my partner was beginning to investigate the meaning of creativity around about the same time and through her own investigations introduced to me the concept of flow.

I had never come across this idea before but, very quickly I understood that it was something I’d encountered many times in both my professional and private life. Like many of these kinds of things it’s a very simple idea but people manage to write whole books about it. In simple terms the best way I can describe it is that it is primarily a state of mind.

 

Have you ever engaged in an activity and lost all track of time? Have you ever been so engrossed in something that you’ve not heard the telephone ring, or suddenly looked up from a task and wondered where the day went? Have you ever been so into making something that all problems encountered are easily solved and progress seems to just come naturally? Well, if any of these has happened to you then most likely you have been in flow.

 

Understanding this concept has helped me hugely in recognising what I like doing most in work and play. It has enabled me to make much more informed choices about what work to take on and why sometimes I feel like I’m flogging a dead horse.

 

This finished colour representation of the second of my printed out sketches onto watercolour paper emerged from a concentrated afternoon spent mostly in flow. I have no idea how long it really took, not that it matters, and I got so engrossed in it that the day just vanished in a blur of paints, brushes and water. Not having really done a full colour drawing like this for some time I threw myself into rediscovering how to get the paints to move around the painting and what happens when you put paint on a wetted surface and a dry surface. It sounds simple but I’ve found it’s easy to forget all of the little tricks one develops for oneself to get things looking how you want them. There are a couple of things not quite right with it, like needing more variance in my greys. But there are also some great things about it too. I’d forgotten how vibrant the liquid watercolours I use for some parts can be (Dr. Ph. Martin’s Radiant concentrated water colours, hopefully available at all good art shops worth their salt). The red for the tank really helps the image to jump off the page which is such a satisfying outcome, for me anyway. I’m attending the 50th birthday party for a very old friend this weekend and I’m so pleased with this image I think I’ll give it to him as a present. He’s a bit of a bike nut too, so here’s hoping he’ll like it.

 

The first sketch, with the mechanic behind the bike, is very nearly done too so I’ll post that up in a day or so. The bigger biro drawing of the big single cylinder cafe racer is coming along well to and will be here soon. Watch this space.