Category Archives: Doodles

Lining paper, a surprisingly good drawing medium.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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This is a sketch for one of the remaining drawings that are left to do. This was done as a kind of experiment. It’s at least 60% bigger than any of the others for a start, which allowed me to be a little less precise with everything, and seeing what an increase in scale would look like proved a useful exercise. Sometime in the future it would be great to create some much bigger drawings and my first tentative steps in this direction are being taken now. As mentioned above it’s not significantly larger than any of the others but, creating it starts to give me a feel for what changes when you go up in size. How you deal with proportion, detail and tonal variation across the drawing. One also has to consider the implication on ones preferred medium. I’m not sure that working in biro across an A1 sheet or larger is going to be a fruitful or spirit crushing experience. Only one way to find out I suppose.

 

It’s drawn directly, no pencil rough out, on to heavy duty (1400 weight) lining paper, the stuff you stick on your walls at home to even out a wall surface before painting. It’s not good quality paper for sure but, it does have this kind of hard textured surface which works really well with a medium point biro, almost making it feel like using a pencil such is the subtlety of shading one can achieve. Being quite thick allows you to work into the paper a good deal to achieve the thick black areas but, the pay off is not the usual warping and distortion you get with other, albeit finer, papers.

 

Yes, it can be a bit scratchy and coarse but it’s great stuff, cheap as chips and comes on a roll, so you can cut sheets to any size. I would mention though that at first it was a challenge to get it to lie flat, at all. Leaving it under a pile of books for a couple of days didn’t work, so I ended up ironing it with a hot but dry iron and then left it in a pile under a couple of pads. Much better. This weeks top tip for ploughing through sketches without worrying about using up your expensive art shop bought sketch pads. I’m going to have a look at lighter weights of lining paper to see if the texture is different and check out how they perform. An update will hit the blog soon.

 

Accessing embedded knowledge works.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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An early drawing using early knowledge.

Following the magnitude of the last post it feels as if my brain needs a kind of rest, a short period to recoup and spend some more time considering drawing from imagination, what is starting to feel like a very big subject area. This won’t be the last time it comes up for discussion but, a bit more thinking time is required to crystalise my thoughts further. More often than not, insights arrive at unexpected times and from unexpected directions and letting them do this randomly relieves the pressure of sitting down and trying to think of what they could be before their arrival. It’s a bit like having your best ideas whilst having a bath I suppose.

 

It can be so easy to get distracted from ones core activity, in my case creating my pictures, and this has been happening a good deal of late. The process of clearing the backlog of drawings for posting needs to come to an end and there’s only one way that’s going to happen, putting them up here. This posts title image was done just over nine months ago, and why it didn’t get posted remains unanswered. What’s interesting about it now is how different it is from the later drawings that have gone up over the last couple of months. In the previous post I wondered whether familiarity breeds more embedded knowledge that we can access subsequently. Looking at this drawing I would posit that the answer to that question is yes. Later drawings are much more detailed and intricate, partly through design but also due to the mere fact that I know more about the subject matter, and crucially can access that new knowledge without necessarily realising it. Result.

The idea wall in action.

One other aspect of this exercise that has caused some pondering is that of subject focus. Since starting this whole bike drawing thing I’ve quite happily jumped from one type of subject to another. A dragster, then a road bike, then something else etc etc. All well and good you might think, but actually it was starting to be problematic in the sense that it was becoming hard to separate certain specific thoughts and ideas for one image from another. In simple terms, details for one drawing were ending up on another and vice versa. This probably had, or has, something to do with my habit of having two or three drawings on the go at any one time. As an attempt at remedying this a different approach was needed. So now instead of multiple drawings of multiple themes, the latest project concentrates on a core theme with multiple drawings around it. It already feels a better way to work as there seems to be a greater cohesion in what’s being created. This first series is about cafe racers and I’ll explain more about it in the next post. For now here are some of the preliminary sketches that are currently adorning the small wall of the studio.

Messing with different views.Speech bubbles could make a comeback.

 

 

Pleasingly vibrant.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Back at the start of January there was a post about clearing the decks to make way for fresh projects. It’s safe to say that this process is fully underway, though it’s a truism that as much as you try and finish off one set of things, you often can’t help yourself from generating more that only add to the pile. Not sure what that’s called but there must be a word for it somewhere.

The image above is the latest to get the “I must finish that sometime” treatment. It would be safe to say that it has been hanging around in the pending file for too long. It stated life as a very quick and rough biro sketch in a rather ropey old A3 pad used for just such things (see below). And that’s where it stayed. Then one day it got scanned, the reason for which now escapes me, and finally was printed out as a test to see how the printer would cope with rough water colour paper, reduced to A4. For some reason only the tyres got the benefit of some paint, until this week when I finally surrendered, and decided to give it a bit more love and attention.

It is still really a test image in the sense that the greys are mostly of a new kind not used before, made by Schmincke, which needed road testing. Lovely paint. It comes in refreshingly old fashioned little metal tubes, at 5ml size, and has a depth to it that makes it great to use. The other trial aspect is wanting to see how these new greys worked up against the luminous intensity of the Dr. Ph Martin’s liquid water colours used on some of the smaller paintings. Choosing a bright orange for the main bodywork has taken the colour contrasts to an unexpected though very welcome level. Although water colour is a favoured medium it often leaves the image with a very dull feeling. Using the liquid colours enables me to get that “pop” back into the picture. Bikes are exciting things and it makes sense to communicate some of that through the colour. It is gratifying to realise that the persistence of the old drawings nagging has finally led to a very pleasing conclusion.

Here below is a reference pic of the liquid water colour. Available in two sizes, as shown, and available in most good art shops. Thoroughly recommended if you’re looking to pump up the colour intensity in a water colour image.