Category Archives: sketches

Cafe Racer No.6, finally.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Cafe Racer No.6

It’s raining, it must be June. Whilst the bad weather this weekend has done its best to put a massive dampener on anyone taking part in celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, in my case it has succeeded in driving me indoors, away from the distractions of motorcycling and into the chair in front of my drawing table. Unable to feel the tug of a sunny afternoon and a spin on the 250, a final spurt of creative energy means that the final drawing in the Cafe Racer series is now complete. Why this drawing has taken so long to finish could have something to do with the fact that all spare time over the last week has been taken up by constructing, fitting and painting a new front gate and posts, and giving the front door a once over. It may also have something (more) to do with nerves. When a drawing gets to a critical stage it can often be the case that I approach completing the final details with some trepidation, messing it up at a late stage is a huge risk. Biro is a fantastic medium, but you can never ever erase it. Once it’s down, that’s it. But it’s done now and other projects can start to take shape while I learn to breathe again!

The second part of todays double header is another lining paper sketch that didn’t make the final selection. It’s nearly there but not quite, very much a case of “ close, but no cigar”.  I was attempting to show some speed in the image without resorting to ending up with a huge blur. Various elements of the figure trailing off into the slipstream left behind. It’s something I have seen others do much more successfully than I’ve managed in this case, so there is some work to be done to get it working and may very well benefit from being tried again using a different medium. It is something worth aiming for as the alternative is the rather obvious big blurry background, and I’m not quite in the mood for one of those just yet. I’ll post my experiments as I go so you’ll soon see how things are progressing.

 

 

Cafe Racer No.6 – more progress.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Cafe Racer 6

While the urge to “ship” or complete any drawing or image is a strong one, it’s very much proving to be a case of “slowly, slowly, catchy monkey” with this one. Jacket and hands done, head and legs to follow, and then something to ground it. Pushing aside the daily distractions of everyday life to focus on a specific creative task, particularly when that task is not born of your normal world of deadline fueled rushing about, is a skill which all of us amateurs must constantly struggle with. I am no different. It is good to know though, that these periods of slow progress are more than balanced by highly productive phases when stuff just pours out of your head and hand, and across the page. these slower moments are also a great opportunity for reflecting on sketch work and ideas, learning new things, recharging the creative batteries and dabbling in other creative pursuits.It would be good to finish it off by the end of the week though.

Here above is another of the sketches done on lining paper a while ago whilst churning out ideas for the Cafe Racer series.I like the idea behind it but my execution of the idea went a bit off track which led to me not including it in the first series. Rather like with the previous sketch shown in the last post I managed to make a bit of a fudge of the front wheel and that kind of ran all the way up the front forks too. Must try harder. You’ll also notice, and fair dues if you haven’t, that the rider figure has a strange look about him. Amongst other things his nose is a tad weird and his chin’s gone the same way too. It’s only a sketch so one can’t be too critical but, these things matter if one is to learn from examining ones own work and improve things for the future. What works though is the bike, apart from the front bit of course. It has that solidity to it that I’m always looking for, a great big engine surrounded by a chunk of hefty engineering. Again this will likely get redrawn sometime in the future, perhaps in another medium, and much bigger even. certainly a contender for the pending file.

 

 

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.