Chasing the thief away.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Welcome back. Having covered the time thieving monster of procrastination on my last post I’m happy to report that I’m now starting to get over it. It is an undoubted truism that it can be laid to rest by the mere act of sitting down and starting something, anything. So today I’ve had a bit of a scribble and come up with a new header for the blog, something which I hope says more about what goes on here than the last one, and the one before that etc. It’s been a lot of fun doing it as I managed to persuade myself that playing with my colour paints would be a very good thing today. The sun is shining and a bit of colour injected into what has been a very dreary few days lifts the mood.

In the previous post I showed one of two sketches I’ve been playing with recently. Here is the second of the pair. It follows along the lines of the theme for the first one and continues with the idea of a frame which is more of a monocoque forming the bodywork of the bike as much as the support for the engine and chassis parts. Again it’s also fun to experiment with some kind of extreme engineered front end, I’m developing a soft spot for these single legged kind of forks, and have another great big engine slung in there to create a fun feeling of speed and power.

I was trying to work out where the inspiration for these two drawings came from. It’s interesting that often I’ll draw something and have no recollection of where the idea might have come from. I gather images of all kinds of stuff from books, the internet and photographs I take myself. In an attempt to be well organised I file them away on a hard drive somewhere and try to catalogue them so that I can refer to them later. But what often happens is that I rarely look at them at all whilst I’m drawing. As a consequence I often generate an initial sketch without their help but, some part of them must lodge itself in my mind somewhere as I can often find a link between a drawing and a stored image after the event. It’s a strange twist on post-rationalisation I suppose. The BMW R7 shown in the picture is where the main inspiration for these two drawings came from. It’s from the 1930’s as far as I know. I love it. It’s such a fantastic expression of futuristic thinking from that period. There is so much motion in the form language, extenuated by the white pin striping but it is the way that it appears to have no frame that catches my eye first. I’ve got a feeling this bike will influence a few more of my doodles before the effect wears off.

Anyway, this sketch above will get worked up along with the other one in ink to start with. I love it as it is in pencil so I’ll most likely work through onto another sheet with the light box and then revisit this image with more pencil work to get some more detail in there and some deeper tonal areas. I’d like to then scan the inked drawing and print a few out so that I can start to play around with some colour without risking mucking up the original, I’d hate to lose a good drawing through messing about with some paints. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

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.

Keeping it up.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Strange effects courtesy of the scanner.

Prompted by my lovely niece Rose, who’s currently away in Germany on a working year for her language degree, todays post has some drawings in it. She quite rightly let me know that all the bike building stuff is all very well but, where are all the sketches etc that filled the blog when it started? I suppose I had got a bit engrossed in the bike build so, for Rose and all other fans of them here are a couple of drawings.

You will remember from previous posts that I was having trouble deciding on backgrounds for some of the images, I still am, it’s definitely becoming a work in progress though my inner self wishes I would just get on and resolve it once and for all. The reasons I’m posting this sketch are two-fold. Firstly I wanted to see how one of the drawings would turn out if I employed an old technique that I haven’t used for ages. Namely inking in the sketch with a very fine tipped felt pen and then gently “washing” over selected areas with a damp brush to create the shading I wanted. I was working just on some thin layout paper as this was a bit of an experiment. I had a feeling that the paper would warp with the moisture from the brush, but I ignored it. Then I put it in the scanner and this is the result, a kind of sunburst pattern around the drawing. I understand that it’s the result of how the light from the scanner falls and moves across the paper, but it’s a pleasant surprise that it creates this effect around the drawing but not across it. Interesting. Backgrounds by mistake, perhaps there is something in this, leaving things to a kind of creative serendipity.

This other drawing is one that I did a little while ago. Again, my sharing this one with you is to do with background again. here I tried to follow up on the idea that I create a partial background using a distinct part of the drawing, namely the smoke billowing out around the rear tyre. I’m not sure that it works that well as I don’t think I rendered the smoke particularly competently. It’s an idea I want to try again. I think I overdid the level of detail in the puffiness of the smoke, perhaps a simpler approach would work better. I do like however the way you can leave holes in the smog through which one can see parts of the bike and wheel. The only drawback to this is that it’s a lot of work to create a drawing that in the end doesn’t work. But that’s half the fun is it not, and we have to do these things in order to learn and move things forward.

So if we believe that we should try and learn something new every day, then today I’ve learned not to leave such big gaps between my sketch posts and that my funny old scanner has the capacity for unexpected creativity. Who would have thought it?