Tag Archives: finishing touches

Wrestling with your passion.

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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The Paddock Push.

Ok, so this one doesn’t fit into the cafe racer series but, it’s been with me for a while, slowly reaching completion and falling conveniently into the category of “ work needing to be finished. It’s called “Paddock Push”.

 

The inspiration for it came from a few different angles. Throughout the history of bike sport there have always been instances of intrepid individuals wrestling moderately inappropriate machinery around Off Road. Massive BMW’s careering across the Sahara in the Paris Dakar, Harley Davidsons pounding around the Catalina Grand Prix and overweight Brit engined motocrossers ripping up the fields of England. Wherever there are lightweights, one will find the heavyweights somewhere in the background.

 

This is not necessarily a homage to these feats of derring-do, however I am drawn to the thought of the unlikely hero, the underdog. The choice was to create one in full flight and one in a more static situation. The first to be complete is the latter, where the apparent grace and power of a big machine in motion is replaced by the struggle to man-handle the thing around when the engine has finished doing what it does best. If you’ve ever moved a heavy machine around on a loose surface you’ll understand why the guy is huffing and puffing.

 

The next cafe racer picture is nearly done. Watch this space.

 

Is it now a painting?

Posted on by Soulcraftcandyman
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Finally got around to putting the finishing touches to this one the other evening and so wanted to get it up on the blog as soon as possible. As much as I like the final result, it’s proving difficult to decide what to say about it today other than to ask the question, “is it now a painting?”

Certainly the character of the image is completely different, the starkness of the ink drawing is replaced by a softness afforded by the colour treatment. What’s also interesting is that even though a stronger connection to reality is forged with the addition of colour, it has also brought a stronger emphasis to some of the more comic elements.

The purpose of the exercise however was not to set up some kind of competition between the two images, more to explore how colour would effect the final outcome and to get my rusty painting hand back into action. Some details proved easy and enjoyable to do whilst others remained a challenge, so there is still work to do before getting to that point where one is confident in creating what your minds eye can see, on the page in front of you. They say that in order to truly become an expert at something you must practice it for something like ten thousand hours, quite a way to go if expertise is the goal. Thankfully it is not, well not yet anyway, re-learning to play with some colour media is. So there will be more of these.

Enjoy the view.