Category Archives: Familiar

Confronting your creative comfort zone, one step at a time.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Paint and ink detail be Kon Tremnlett for Soulcraftcandy.

Welcome to the first post of the new year, a year supposedly fully fueled with fresh resolve to go beyond merely just carrying on. Actually, to be honest, I made no new resolutions regarding the blog, and this may end up being a good thing as it will keep the devil of disappointment from the door for a while. Y’see, it’s not even the end of January and the thieves of time have already raided the creative cupboard and made off with more than they usually swipe. The important thing at times like this is not to stop altogether, to keep chipping away, even if it is only a small bit at a time. This is how it goes sometimes and part time work can often morph into something with a greedy appetite for your precious time. I liken it to when we used to listen to the radio on sets that possessed a manual tuning dial. Often the signal would fade or go crackly, and in order to hear the music again you had to lean over and move the tuning control ever so slightly. Clarity would return. So currently the dial of life needs some subtle turning to get back to a more balanced feeling.

 

But creative work never stops and thankfully the drawing projects are still on going, just a bit more slowly than usual. The image above is a detail of what’s on the drawing board right now. Essentially it’s a larger colour version of a drawing I did over a year ago as part of the original cafe racer series in biro. I’ve been wanting to do a colour one for ages, so got the brushes out just before Christmas and have been chipping away ever since.

 

Like previous pictures this one is being done on Bristol Board using water colour washes and my trusty technical pens. Although progress is slow, I’m enjoying every minute of it and, taking my time has allowed me to make some considered changes to my plan and think a bit more deeply about what I’m doing.

 

This is all good stuff, but it’s also causing me to realise that I should perhaps be trying to do more with the paint. I’ll try and explain what I mean. At the core of it would be a feeling that I am not a natural painter, someone who’s automatically at home with the medium. For me, and this probably harks back to formative years, the application of paint to an image has always been a colouring in exercise, following some kind of predetermined outline to render a colour picture. It has never really ever been used as an expressive tool in its own right. As a result I’ve established this kind of comfort zone in which my painting exists and is quite cosy for me. So there’s a challenge in the near future to see if I can get out of that comfort zone and see if I can make more of what’s out there. People endlessly talk about thinking outside of the box these days, well this is a challenge of DOING outside of the box.Painting, whether it be in oils, acrylics or water colour is a combination of many skills and techniques and yes, it is daunting to think that one is only in possession of a small amount of skill and a couple of techniques but, it is also exciting to know that there is a world of image making still out there waiting to be tried. My professional life does not allow me the luxury of experimentation so, somehow expectedly, I’ll need to break some habits too if I’m going to improve my skills. Rather like the picture from the last post, you never know what’ll happen until you try, so flinging some paint around could reveal some interesting things. The key will be to learn, as much as create and make. Here’s to an experimental and rewarding 2014.  I’ll keep you posted.

 

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We are all story tellers, Part 1.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Old sketch, new life.

In the previous post I alluded to my attempts to find new directions in which to take some, or all, of the drawings that pop out of the studio here. For a long time now there has been a persistent challenge in completing the ink drawings in particular, which has somehow not diminished or been overcome no matter the approach taken. It is that old thorny issue of context. Whether the inability to get this nailed is the result of never being formally trained in illustrative techniques, or some weird hangover from years drawing objects as a product designer I’m not sure. The more I think about it, the more I’m persuaded it’s a combination of things, some of which go right back to when we learn to draw in the first place and how we look at the world we are trying to capture.

 

The connection between ones minds eye and the imagination is a fascinating one and is undoubtedly different in all of us. How we imagine things, scenes, objects and the like also varies within us from moment to moment. When drawing from life one is saved from creating context because, in a way, it’s right there in front of us, and we are able to use some visual editing to eliminate that which we feel is surplus to our requirements. In imaginative drawing this is almost reversed, we must “fill in” first before editing down.

 

What’s this got to do with stories you might ask? Well, part of the success or failure of an imaginative image, I believe, lies in providing enough information to not only hold the eye of the viewer, but also to captivate their imagination in the hope that we allow them to extract as much as possible from the image. In a way we try to tell a story, or at least provide enough to start a story off, to allow the imagination to take us somewhere. Although a fairly simple sounding premise it has taken me some time to work this out in my own mind, which I’d much rather do than read it in some book or other. Because I’m a person who sees objects more than scenes in the minds eye, providing this context is always a struggle. Previous attempts have had mixed success. Shaded geometric shapes have helped to place the image on the page, but no more. Inserting scenes such as horizon lines inhabited with trees and buildings have helped too but run the risk of pulling the central image back towards reality and becoming repetitive. What I wanted to find was a format that would give more flexibility whilst being very much in tune with the language of the images.

 

The little drawing above might give you a fairly clear idea as to where this is going.

 

Comfort in the familiar.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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With the lightbox constructed the speed and easiness with which I can transpose drawings onto fine quality paper is greatly improved. What I really like about it is the ability it gives you to not only see where you are with the drawing as you go but, also it’s become much easier to make those fine adjustments to the composition. I appreciate that this all sounds wonderfully old fashioned but there is a beauty in that.

Another problem I’ve been dealing with on a relatively regular basis is that of getting into the rhythm of drawing on days when it doesn’t come easily. I’m not an artist and as such I’m not in the habit of engaging with my work on a daily basis. There are often gaps and I find that my eye takes time to get back in when I return to the page and the pen. Normally I find a good scribble gets me into the swing but there are other times when nothing progresses beyond that. Angles, proportions and perspectives are all out of my creative reach.

What I’ve found helps me get over this hurdle is to go back to something familiar and draw that. Something that I know intimately and when it comes to drawing bikes there’s nothing more familiar than your own machine. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m lucky enough to have two, but it’s the smaller one which always gets the job. Having spent a month modifying it a couple of years ago, and riding it a lot since then I know it inside out.

Above is a “getting into the rhythm” sketch of the little 250 that eventually went all the way to a finished drawing, below.

Like many of my other images I’m still fiddling about with what device to use to ground the picture and have so far only scratched something rough in using Photoshop. What I find happens when I follow this path to warming up is that the familiarity of the object in some way makes it easier to distort the view and the drawing. Sitting here writing this I’m actually struck by the fact that I haven’t needed to draw the 250 for a couple of weeks, so things in general must be getting better and easier to engage with.

Here’s pic of the bike. I mentioned ages ago in a very early post that I would tell some of the story behind this little special build. This is supposed to be a blog about drawing and making after all. So I shall sprinkle some of that into the mix over the next few posts.