Category Archives: Habits

Two for One.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Welcome to 2012, it’s the new year, and here’s hoping for all of us it will turn out better than the sooth sayers suggest. The new year always brings a short period for fresh resolution and reflection. Being a serial resolution maker and breaker it helps to keep things to a minimum these days, and whilst being happier, healthier and a little wealthier are all things to work towards, it is this small blog which is the main focus for attention this year.

Viewing the newly received stats report from the guys at WordPress will be interesting but, before that’s done I know already that I want to increase my blogging output this year, be more creative and get more stuff out there. Small and obvious goals but ones which are worth noting down. Employing a slightly sideways approach to this challenge the first task at hand is to clear the decks, as it were, and bring to light some things which have been sitting here waiting for a chance to strut their stuff and be viewed. By tidying up some loose ends, particularly in respect of showing a sketch and not the subsequently finished drawing, I’m hoping to clear a bit of a backlog, physically as well as mentally. The hope is that this will free up some much needed brain space for new ideas and projects.

The drawing at the top of the post featured as an initial scribbly biro layout and then a more tidy pencil sketch waiting to be given a good inking. It follows a theme which is proving to be quite enduring, lots of healthy detail centered around the middle of the drawing, some punchy contrast areas and a kind of fish eye lens effect in the perspective. It’s one of my personal favourites and neatly treads a line between feasibility, if you drag the idea towards reality, and a cartoon if you pull it the other way towards fantasy. Again it’s done in black Bic biro on A3 Bristol paper (250 gsm) which is rapidly becoming a kind of default medium for this type of drawing.

This second drawing, completed shortly after the previous one, again has the detail and contrast areas coming through. I don’t like to comment on my drawings too much other than to discuss more technical aspects of them, preferring to leave aesthetic judgements to others. What’s important to me in looking at these is seeing whether they show any improvements in style, technique and composition, that kind of thing. How far have things come from the early days of the blog when bike related drawings were starting to be a larger part of life.

Observations, of course, tend to vary depending on mood and other variables but, today three things in particular come across. First is the quality of my sometimes wayward cross hatching. It’s getting more even, probably due to being better able to balance control and patience. Certainly the latter, as making a zillion lines can get to you after a while, and remembering to wipe the end of the pen occasionally helps too, none of those horrible little inky blobs to contend with. The second is to do with shadows and ground lines. By worrying less about crispness, and more about texture, the “hairy” and “lumpy” approaches give texture to the ground the bike is riding over through implication rather than needing to render bits of earth. A happy accident really, it wasn’t part of the original plan. The final bit is about the riders and their clobber. Folding fabrics have always been a challenge and hard to figure out no matter how many times clothes were sketched etc. All I can summise is that less is more. Fewer wrinkles and bolder shading seems to be doing the trick. All that’s needed is to repeat how it goes from one drawing to another, the habit of referencing one drawing whilst making another has yet to take root fully, but it will in time.

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.

The thief of time.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Before anyone feels the need to castigate me regarding my absence from the world of posting, I would like to save them the trouble. My guilt over not posting lately has become something of a large stick with which I am now adept at beating myself with. It hurts, emotionally as much as anything else. Unlike compulsory things in life like school homework, writing a best mans speech and filling out ones tax return, a blog is thankfully voluntary. This makes it indulgent, personal, experimental and loaded with an intangible sense of achievement whenever a post is completed. It also makes it prey to that most horrible of thieves, procrastination.  Described in an age old adage as the “thief of time”, procrastination occupies a place in most of our lives. it’s just that some of us deal with it more effectively than others.

In a way I could describe myself as a life long procrastinator, though recently I’ve realised that it’s not as simple as that. If I were truly a procrastinator I’d get nothing done at all but, generally I get a good deal of stuff done, just not necessarily in the order and timescale in which I first envisioned doing it. What I have a tendency to do is constantly shuffle the order of my tasks which leads to me doing certain things as a way of avoiding doing others. Or as a way of making it seem alright not to do something that has no specific deadline. I had a quick glance on the net about this and have found an interesting article which talks about structured procrastination, the art of putting stuff off whilst getting a lot done.

I shall read further into this area and get back to you with my findings, when I finally get round to it!

Needless to say, the time between now and my last post has been quite busy (here I go exercising the procrastinators primary defence tool, the excuse). May, June and a bit of July got swallowed up with a big freelance job, and I’m in no position to turn work away. Yes I have remnants of evenings and weekends not working but to be honest with you I’m usually pretty creatively exhausted by the end of a long day. I had a short holiday in Turkey, on a boat, which I would recommend to anyone and work has picked up again since my return. Being summer there has been lots to do getting the garden into shape and there have been some great days out on the motorbike as well.

Though I may not have been posting I have at least been sketching out some ideas for some more drawings. The sketch shown here is an expansion upon an idea I had some time ago. The core theme, if there is one is based around the concept of a kind of monocoque that surrounds the engine and forms the meat of the frame and bodywork in a single form. It’s not a new idea in the sense that bikes have been designed and built like this for real but it’s an idea I wanted to explore in my artform. What’s great about drawings like these is that one can include lots of apparently extreme engineering ideas, like the mono-fork front end without worrying too much about whether it really works or not. Does it make the drawing more interesting, that’s what I’m after.

I’m sticking with my penchant for a great big engine in there and  bit of exaggeration when it comes to the other aspects of the bike without it looking too unfeasible.

I’m going to work this one up in ink on some decent paper, using my previously mentioned new light box, and I’m sorely tempted to throw a bit of colour at it in the way of a watercolour wash rather than a tightly precise painting. Not quite sure how that’s going to work but it’s worth taking the risk as long as I keep the original sketch to work up from again if I make a mess of it.

Watch this space.