Category Archives: Doodles

The Captain.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Here’s another slice of the mixed fruit cake of drawing that goes on around here. The picture above shows a guy I have been playing about with for some time, and he’s the closest I’ve ever got to developing a character. He arrived in my life some time ago whilst working on a communications project. An opportunity had arisen to use a character to promote certain messages the client had in mind. This guy was not a direct result of that exercise but was born during a moments idle sketching one evening. The project had been about communicating expertise and my mind had wandered in the opposite direction to contemplating ineptitude and how to communicate that. The idea of a bungling, idiotic and ineffectual “superhero” type had a strange appeal, someone with all the gear and no idea.

Not long after his arrival he was given a name, Captain Shark, after my small design business whose logo he wears on his chest, and for want of anything better at the time. He rapidly went from a slightly muscular bloke to this rather podgy individual graced with abundant enthusiasm, an overly fertile imagination and elevated sense of his own abilities. A sidekick in the form of a small dog appeared soon after and my sketchbook at the time bulged with sketches of him trying to engage with the world in one form or another. And there he has remained for some time now apart from a few select outings like the watercolour above. This has very much to do with not knowing exactly what to do with him.

Over the last year or so he has undergone some experimental name changes, I closed my company so the shark reference doesn’t have the same ring to it, and a dormant attempt to turn him into something else, like a mad inventor or suchlike. So he’s very much still a work in progress.

What he does have though is staying power as frequent visits are made to that particular sketchbook to move him on a bit further or simply play around with him.

Whatever fate awaits him, he is immense fun to sketch and draw. Because his body form consists of a series of rounded blobs he is moderately easy to pose and the tight fitting spandex outfit lends him a kind of elasticity that is fun to exploit. Being a cartoon he is a great vehicle for trying things out, for instance, if I’m stuck on something else like a posture it’s often faster and easier to work it out using his bendy body form first and then develop from there. He is essentially like a bit of 2 dimensional modelling clay and a handy catalyst for getting ideas moving. More about him soon.

Scribbles.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Despite much evidence to the contrary it is still a feature of the drawing activity (for me anyway) that one finds oneself staring blankly at a clean piece of paper without the slightest notion of what to put on it. You find yourself a bit stuck. Somewhere back in the annals of the blog this subject has probably already been mentioned, but the other day it happened again and a long forgotten way to get round it emerged from the deepest recesses of the ol’ grey matter.

As a child, art class at junior school was always something to look forward to with relish. as a consequence we needed absolutely no encouragement to throw ourselves head long into cramming the available paper sheet with images. It was as if our naivety gave us a courage to overcome any fears we may have harboured about subject matter, scale, detail and colour in our image making. The sheer joy of being creative for an hour or two gave us the energy to be unconstrained by any and all compositional constraints. What a lot of fun it was but, sadly it wasn’t the same for everyone and things don’t stay this way for ever. In fact I remember certain kids who suffered being utterly intimidated by a blank sheet of paper or a full palette of paints. Gregory King wasn’t one of them though, oh no, he knew exactly what he was going to paint or draw every time, a big red racing car. The bigger and redder the better. These remained a bedrock of Greg’s creative output for as long as I knew him. When charged with the task of rendering a nativity scene he would find a way to squeeze a big red racing car in there somewhere. We could analyse Greg’s fascination but I digress. The essence of this is that he had found a way to never be short of an idea.

As we learned more and knew more, our creativity changed too. The free flowing rampage across the paper of pencil, charcoal and paint fell victim to learned concerns about proportion, composition and fidelity of colour. It was as if a pendulum was swinging towards its other extreme and would culminate in either total mastery of ones medium or the frozen wastes of the blank sheet of paper. For any of us who’ve accessed our artistic creativity for most of our lives, learning to steer the pendulum towards the former outcome rather than the latter is a lifelong challenge which we confront relatively frequently. Moments of absolute flow are matched by others of a kind of creative block. Only we ourselves can solve the problem and navigate these moments. These strategies are not hard to learn, the challenge lies in finding those which work for you and remembering them when needed.

For some all it takes is simply making a mark on the paper, drawing a random line to get you going. For others it starts with an inky fingerprint or a splash of paint. Some people choose to merely copy something to get the process started. The sketch at the top of this post began with a personal favourite, hovering over the paper with a pen and gently touching the surface as the hand engages in a random series of movements. In a way it’s just like starting with a random line but feels very different and prescriptive. Anyway sooner or later something begins to appear. It doesn’t take much and off the imagination goes down some path. As the sketch emerges I maintain this hovering approach with the pen and move around the drawing adding bits here and there, slowly building elements and detail. Using a pen means not being able to erase anything, which has interesting side effects and introduces a gentle kind of discipline to the process. Though having said that, the slightly non-comital nature of line creation helps to keep the whole thing a bit more fluid. This more scribbly way of making an image is quite liberating and definitely helps to loosen up the mind as well as the hand.

In a way the drawings created are never really finished, you can stop whenever you choose to, and this lends them a liveliness often lacking from more formal sketches and drawings. Their quality might only be appreciated through the eyes of the beholder, but if they’ve unlocked the block then their purpose is complete. Here’s the next sketch that popped out straight after the one above.

Keep your sketches.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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There is an unseen conversation going on in this picture. It is a chat between man and machine.

When the original sketches for this picture were posted, my good friend Richard spotted them and sent me a mail. Although my own feelings what might be being said here leant towards the idea that either party could be asking of the other, “let’s see what you’ve got, what you’re made of?”, he likened it to ones acquaintance with a long term friend, and the continuation of a conversation. There is no questioning in his version, just a simple statement, “hello old friend, let’s go out and play”.

For me it works both ways and what lies at the core of either is the belief that one forms relationships with objects that you interact with, both on an emotional and physical level. This is true about many objects that we choose to spend time with.

Ask any motorcyclist about the bikes they own or have owned and they will fall into one of the following two categories (probably). Firstly there are those that do nothing more than give us access to their basic usefulness, provide transport for us, carry us from A to B. They are handy, but never indispensable. Appreciated but never loved. Used but never improved. The second group are different. They connect with us on an emotional level beyond the practical, we consider their good and bad points in equal measure and make improvements where we can. We clean them out of pride as much as necessity, and we like to show them off. In short we invest time in making them ours. They are often referred to as “keepers”.

To some extent it’s the same with the many sketches I produce. Again there are those whose only function seems to be to act as the expression of an idea and nothing more. Their purpose totally fulfilled purely through existence, visual jots to remind you that you had an idea. It would be easy to think that the group that sits alongside these would be those that hit the spot first time, but this would be untrue. They do occasionally appear but it’s rare. Like the bikes that turn into “keepers”, members of this other group connect with us in a different way. We see in them the potential of an idea that is yet to be fully formed. With a bit of time and effort thrown at it you know what’s lurking in there can be brought to the surface. It might mean totally redrawing it, many times over in some cases, or it may require nothing more than the addition or relocation of a few lines. The more you can see the potential emerge the more you’re inspired to tease more of it out. Before you realise it you’ve got another “keeper”, ready to work up to a finished image.

Have you ever wondered why so many of us scribblers keep so many piles of apparently jumbled and crumpled sketch sheets? Although I spend a great deal of time and energy sketching out fresh ideas, a good deal of time is also spent revisiting many older ones too. Spreading them out across the floor and having  another look for that spark always throws up something new that perhaps you didn’t see before. Finding these “sleepers” and working to turn them into “keepers” is one of the great pleasures in making these drawings. It provides a big chunk of the creative reward and always reminds me that it’s not always about the end goal, but the journey one took to reach it.