Category Archives: Getting you eye in

Play with your paints.

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To those of you visiting the blog it looks like nothing has been going on for some time. In some ways this is true and, in others, nothing could be further from the truth. We are all, at some stage or another victims of things that are beyond our control. Sometimes they are things which require our immediate attention, are complex problems that need solving, or often purely connected to the mundanity of modern life. In this case it has been the latter, the need to go out and earn a meagre living. This unhelpful chunk of freelance work, because I’d rather spend my time at home drawing, has been a bit of a distraction, one of those monsters with lots of problem solving thrown in to leave you drained at the end of every day.

Creative image making has not ground to a halt though, it has merely slowed a bit and this is mainly due to me getting my water colour paints out and having a play. Keeping any colour work and the monochrome stuff going concurrently is quite a challenge as they require you to switch between knowledge centres in your brain all the time and I find that quite tiring. But the colour experiments have been fun so far and I’ll get the results of this fiddling up here as soon as possible.

In the meantime enjoy the latest of my “bikeheads”. These are always quite small and so serve as a great way to warm up or practise a particular technique. Returning to the brushes even after a couple of days exposes some rustiness unless one is a consummate expert, and I am certainly not, so it’s a good way to get back into the swing of things. What is interesting about playing with the paints and inks is that the outcome is still often a surprise, invariably unexpected, both good and bad. The good ones prompt you to commit that small action to memory, putting it in the “do that next time” folder. The bad ones go in the “don’t do that” folder and usually make your eyes bleed. I’ve got one of those to show you next time.

 

Sketching, lots of sketching.

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Dragster ideas.

With the print store now active, some space in the old brain is now free again to concentrate on filtering through influences and inspirations, sketching out ideas and hopefully generating some new images. Getting back into the swing of things as it were. It has also provided a moment to reflect on where things are going and how to try and incorporate various ongoing media experiments into the work flow.

 

The recent visit to the Dragstalgia meet at Santa Pod raceway has gone some way to rekindle interest in the whole dragster thing and this has started to filter through into the pages of the sketch book in preparation for launch into some more finished pieces. Like so many aspects of this motorcycling interest it serves up so much visual inspiration it seems often difficult to decide which bits to tackle first. There is a kind of blindness that descends upon you when venturing into an enormous retail store sometimes, there is so much stuff in front of you that you have no idea where to look first. It’s the same with some of these biking subjects, particularly if one finds oneself staring at the panorama of images downloaded from the camera into your photo library. The feeling can be that you are looking at everything and nothing at the same time. I find I can only get round this by switching it off and doing something else for a while. The subconscious is then somehow released to do what it does best and filter through the information before popping a mail into your mental in-box to let you know some form of direction has been chosen.

 

This is the time to sketch.

Dragster ideas 2.

 

Time to sell some prints.

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A kind of hotrod.

So, another unscheduled gap in posting comes to an end, thankfully. Regularity and consistency remain difficult habits to develop but, this is very much a work in progress. It has been a busy time lately with much happening in the background, more about that in a moment, and the occasional distraction, for example a first time visit to Santa Pod raceway to see some drag racing and feed the imagination. All I can say at this juncture about that experience is that I have never heard anything quite as loud in my whole life. And spectacular too, despite it being a “nostalgia” meeting, much of the machinery looked anything but old or remotely passed its best.

 

What’s been happening in the background has been much more exciting though on a personal level. Prompted by a steady flow of positive comments, and encouraged to make something more of this drawing project I’m engaged in, it’s time for others to have the opportunity to enjoy the drawings as real things, beyond the virtual world on screen. As a result I am in the process of setting up a small internet shop through which you will be able to purchase high quality art prints of a selected group of drawings. I have been lucky enough to find a fantastic printer who I know I can rely on and whose attention to detail and quality of output are superb, so I am very enthusiastic about moving forward. The shop is not live yet but, getting this far has been an interesting journey through online service suppliers, low level brand fiddling, design, learning about print technologies, and cardboard tube sourcing. Currently the final details are being sorted out in readiness for the grand opening and are reminding me that there is no substitute for putting in the effort and getting it right first time. So the next couple of weeks is promising to be very interesting as things come together, and I will be posting regular progress updates as Soulcraftcandy enters a new era.

 

I have found a little time to do some drawing too. Not as much as I’d like but enough to keep the hand and eye in. Todays picture is a sketch in which I’m trying to do two things. The first is to draw at a slightly larger scale than before. This drawing is about 20 inches across, which is quite a bit larger than previous pictures and challenges my ability to make all of the proportional changes needed to jump up in size. Harder than it sounds.

 

Secondly I’m having a go at trying to concentrate the detail and tonal density of the drawing at the centre of the page whilst the outlying areas of the drawing fade away, and couple this with leaving the rider figure outlined but unrendered. The eye and brain, working together, have an incredible ability to complete an unfinished image, to fill in the gaps, if you can give them enough basic information to start with. This drawing may not be finished in the true sense of the word, but in another way it already is. In some ways it’s already a bit overdone but, finding that fine line between the two seems to be something worth spending some time trying to find.

 

Finally here is a very loose preliminary sketch for the above bike and I’ve got a funny feeling this isn’t the last time this one will be influencing another drawing. You will also notice the inclusion of a new logo, a small sign that things are changing. More about that next time. Watch this space.

Hotrod sketch