Tag Archives: finished drawings

Never say never again.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Pen and ink drawing by Jon Tremlett for soulcraftcandy.

The weekend proved reasonably productive in the end with a fair bit achieved on both of the pictures featured in the last post. Not bad going, considering that most of Saturday was actually spent grappling with the pruning of a monster shrub that lives in my back garden. This thing puts on about four feet of fresh growth annually and as a result needs a good trim at least once a year. I swear it’s a Trifid, its appetite for resources must be huge and it dwarfs everything around it. The killer app is a telescopic long range pruning cutter, but I digress.

 

The big picture now has a rider figure with jeans and a jacket but not much more. More importantly the small “dot” picture is now finished, as you can see above. There was a bit of tidying up to do yesterday but that is now it, the end, it’s done. I’m pretty happy and so is my drawing hand which was starting to shake involuntarily by the end of a marathon dotting session on Sunday. All things considered it’s not too shabby and although I was unsure to start with, using the framing line on the right hand side only, really helps to balance the image. All it needs now is a proper title, it has a working one which is not quite right. 

 

What’s next? Time for some gentle watercolour stuff I think, I have an image already traced out in pencil, and some low impact biro work to get a couple of pending projects up and running. They say “never say never again”, but no more dotting, oh no, not for a while.

 

A new picture and an inspiring book.

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81_FlyBy_2

This is the second version of FlyBy. There wasn’t anything wrong with the first one, it just seemed like a good idea to do another one, and bring in some more of the classic cafe racer details like a black leather jacket with patches on and a big silver tank on the bike.

 

The background got really patchy on this one but once it had dried out fully it didn’t seem too bad after all. The colour works really well with the bike image and it would have been foolhardy to think that it could be rescued or changed in any way by adding more liquid. I’m really pleased with the reflections on the exhaust and the engine side cover, I confess I referred to some photographs to truly try and get a handle on these parts. There is certainly a “way” of doing these things, and it is reliant on being able to pick the information  you want from a photo as it is in being able to access ones embedded knowledge. The former certainly feeds the latter, the photos serving purely to inform what I’m doing rather than be representative of the only way things can be rendered. More of these to come.

This is a great book.

This is a great book.

On another note today, here’s a really great book to recommend. It’s called “An Illustrated Life” by a chap called Danny Gregory. Essentially it is a collection of features on various creative people and their sketchbooks, including he author, though the books are very much the heroes. It is a fascinating look into other worlds where the books are used as journals for recording everyday life, through to how various artists use them as repositories for ideas and laboratories for creative experimentation. To accompany all of this visual candy there is also plenty to read, each featured person is given plenty of column inches to explain what they use their books for, how they do it and, just as importantly, why they do what they do. It is all very enlightening and interesting stuff, I can’t recommend it enough as a source of energy, inspiration and delight. For any of us who spend any time slowly filling sketchbooks all this might at first seem a bit intimidating, but go with it and it soon becomes clear that we are all doing the same thing, just differently and individually. It’s readily available through all the usual channels. Here’s a link: To the book.

Illustrated_Life2 Illustrated_Life3 Illustrated_Life4

 

 

Fish out of water.

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78_Cafe_Stoppie

Whilst scribbling through one of the worksheets a few weeks ago it became clear that at times, streams of ideas cross one another, and at these junctions one often finds a source of inspiration previously unseen. This image above comes from one such junction, the point where ideas about stunts and ideas about cafe racers crossed. It caught my imagination instantly and after some rough sketching there was the basis for a short series depicting such a combination.

 

The main driver of the idea is born out of an apparent change in the context of both. Stunts  like “wheelies” tend to be performed by guys on more modern bikes, though this is a sweeping generalisation of course, and cafe racers, although tending to roar about the place are never spotted doing the kinds of things shown here, the “stoppie”. I wondered what it would throw up if I took one and combined it with the other. There are probably lots of rational reasons why guys with classic bikes don’t show off in such a way, like weight, available power and the delicacy of their old clutches, but cartooning the whole idea lets you forget all that in the name of artistic license.

79_No57

Finally today here is that “smoke” moment I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the one that really didn’t finish well. I have resolved not to try rescuing it yet, it serves as a reminder of how perhaps not to do it, but have overcome any reservations about revealing it to you. More out of context cafe racers soon.