Tag Archives: Bike drawings

Drawing the Shotgun drag bike.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Shotgun_1

The day before yesterday I travelled up to Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire to meet a very interesting chap who’d invited me to come and take a look at his old bike. The fellows name is Nik Fisk and the bike in question is a Triumph engined drag bike called Shotgun built in the late sixties. Nik invited me over having made contact via the blog as he was very interested in commissioning a picture of Shotgun. I’d read about this particular bike in Classic Bike magazine and had also, unwittingly, taken a photograph of Nik pushing it around the paddock at a Dragstalgia meeting at Santa Pod Raceway a couple of years ago. Our email exchange put all of these bits of information together and I leapt at the chance to go and take a look at this bit or drag racing history and meet the man himself. Hence I spent a very interesting, amusing and pleasurable Saturday afternoon standing in the driveway of a house in the village of Podington, where the bike actually lives in Nik’s mates Gordon’s garage.

Shotgun_2

As the sun beat down we devoured home made sandwiches, supped tea, bantered a good deal and admired this wonderful machine. Nik was more than happy to fill me in on the long and varied history of the bike while Gordon, who does most of the spannering on it, elaborated on various technical points and added another layer to our rather humourous discussion. It was fantastic and the guys were wonderfully enthusiastic and knowledgable about both the bike and their experiences of the vintage drag race scene here in the UK.

So this is now my next project. I’m going to have a go at doing a picture of the bike for Nik that he can use in his promotional armoury as he shows it as well as rides it. I’ll gather up my facts and tell you more about this lovely old bike and its life in a subseqquent post but, for now I just wanted to share a couple of pictures of it because it’s a real beauty.

My thanks to Nik and Gordon for such a great day, I hope I can do their faith justice.

It’s very green.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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103_Nail_It©JonTremlett2014

Just a brief post this time as there is still much to do at the end of this Bank Holiday weekend and we are all back at school tomorrow.

So here above is the finished picture that was shown in a part done state a couple of weeks ago. Safe to say it’s very bright and colourful and has turned out pretty much exactly as I planned. I love using a bright orange on the bike tanks and so it seemed only logical to offset that with a blazing green for the background block. And because the bike’s standing pretty much on its nose, then angling the coloured area around it seemed like a good way of emphasising the the dynamic of the image.

This one’s done on a much smoother water colour paper than the usual fare and it makes a real difference to how the inking goes down and the control that one can exercise in the coloured areas. I hope you like it as much as I do. Gotta dash.

Trying something new.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Stoppie©JonTremlett2014

Most of the fabrication work on the bike refresh is now complete and, as I mentioned before, the last big bit of the jigsaw puzzle is coming up with a new paint scheme for the fuel tank and spraying it up. I’ve got something I’m pretty keen on and it’s sitting in the “mulling” section of my brain right now while I have a final think about the colours.

In the meantime here are some pictures in way of an update of what else is happening in the creative microcosm that is Soulcraftcandy. The first is a little sketch I knocked out a while back which immediately demanded a finished version. I’m unsure as to why it sent such a strong signal but I think it’s got something to do with putting the pink bits into the drawing as well as the stance and angle of the whole thing.

Stoppie_prog_1©JonTremlett2014

Needless to say the pink hasn’t survived the move to a more finished image but the idea of using bright colour has, and I’m hoping for quite a punchy little picture when it’s done.

Soulcarftcandy art by Jon Tremlett

These two progress shots show working up the main part of the bike, painting and inking as I go. I find this a good way to work as it enables me to keep an eye on what I’m doing and keep things in control. I find that bringing focus to the picture as it moves along helps me see what I want to do with the next bit, rather than leaving it all rough and inking in everything at the very end. From here I’ll move on to doing the rider figure and then finally the background. Excuse the odd hue of the pictures, it seems to be a consequence of photographing these things in daylight as I can’t fit the backing board onto the scanning bed.

Soulcraftcandy art by Jon Tremlett

This last one is a slightly different animal, an image on which I’m trying to do something new (for me anyway). Firstly I’m trying to paint much more of a complete scene and this is forcing me to think harder about background, middle ground and foreground and the focal relationships between them. In all honesty I’m finding it quite difficult, but it’s rewarding to try and rise to the challenge. My difficulty probably stems from all those years of design drawing where one is not expected to create any sense of depth of field, presentation visuals being very two dimensional in nature, and so it all feels a bit alien and intimidating. So in order to help myself as much as possible I’ve divided the image into three planes, big bike at the front in focus, two smaller bikes on the second level and then the landscape on the third, mainly. The desire to try a bit of freer brush work, which I’ve mentioned before, now gets a chance to play on the background levels and will hopefully minimise my chances of making a muck of it all from the outset and build some much needed confidence in being a bit more loose with how I apply paint to the paper. I’ll keep you posted on progress.