Another swipe from the Alex Loomis book; his style of overly muscular dudes was a great influence on the comic book artists, and he even lays out a “heroic” body format – which is too high and wide to really exist.
This is one of the few drawings ink-based drawings that I would show in public! Most of them are awful, but this one (accidentally) turned out quite well. Phew!
I don’t have a headboard; instead, I have a giant cushion from Ikea. This is a trick I picked up when I was living in Newcastle and staying in low-rate rented accommodation. I must have finished off a lot of books leaning against this pillow in the early hours of the morning!
For this postcard, I was trying to get the patterns of the bedclothes. I’ve been so concerned with trying to do the “form” of things that the patterns on top often get ignored; some of the trickiest stuff to do is the patterns on clothes. I filled in the colour with light washes of gouache over the inks, which I think worked really well.
I brought myself a copy of Alex Loomis’s “Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth”, an old-style guide to figure drawing from the period in history when illustrations filled magazines and popular media. I’ve been idly copying the figures in it, but I noticed that all the naked ladies are wearing high-heels.
I’m not so good at the whole figure. I’m a lot more confident with heads these days, but the actual human figure often ends up a bit… bendy if I draw without reference. I was drawing a lot of people off the TV, but I’ve started watching the Danish crime-drama “The Killing”, and I can’t doodle and read the subtitles at the same time.
As well as doing self-portraits, I often find myself idly sketching the corners of my house I can see from my favourite chairs. From left to right, the images above are my bedroom, the window ledge in my bedroom, and the home entertainment center beneath our TV. Click on the image above to see it larger.
I’ve arranged them left-to-right, earliest painted first. These are all painted on watercolour postcards that you can get pretty cheaply from art supply places. You can see my style of watercolour postcard change, as I figured out things looked better with a border, and then got better at using the Schmincke set I got on my recent holiday. You remember the Schmincke set, right?
When I finished the black and white picture of my bedroom I wanted to mail it to somebody, saying “wish you were here!”. I racked my brain for ages, but I couldn’t figure out who would appreciate the joke without thinking it was me cracking on to them. Or, alternatively, who would find a painting of my messy room really attractive. That’s right, ladies; I’m single and have a messy bedroom. Grrrr!
I swear to you, I’m not an insane person who loves myself so much I have a website where I post pictures of myself. I mean, that’s what LookBook is for (although I was tempted to make an account of myself in my usual, scruffy charity-shop clothes there as a counterpoint to all the fashion-obsessed teenage girls – I just felt that it wasn’t going to be a great venue for my form of humour).
I got the idea for doing self-portraits from the talented artist Mike Mitchell, who said that he learned to paint by doing it. His style is a very attractive sort of cartoon-based form which can also produce really realistic images, and I’d recommend a nose around his site.
I took a lift over to Letchworth and found myself breaking in my new watercolour pad. It’s a really heavy-weight Arches pad, but the same size as the watercolour Moleskin that I was using before. It has a lot more texture, and seems to soak up a lot of water quicker – but it’s no good with the soft pencils I liked to use, as it blunts them immediately. I gave drawing in pen a quick go on the bottom two boxes, but I was starving and people kept walking past with delicious-smelling chips from the takeaway next to me.
It’s almost too hard to draw with that sort of distraction.
Man, I am all about the snappy title, huh?
I managed to finish three notebooks in the space of two days recently. A watercolour notebook I have been using for a few months, a spiral-bound A5 notebook I use for warm-up sketches when out-and-about, and an A4 sketchbook I keep in the house (so I can draw the occasional rude sketch in it and not be worried about somebody seeing it).
What struck me was that this was a great chance to look at my progress. The watercolour book is four months of my experimentations with watercolour – a medium that is famously hard to work with, because once you put watercolour down on the page, it’s basically done. You can’t scrape it off (like oils) or paint over (like acrylic). Here’s the first page of the watercolour notebook:
This is the view from my back garden, as I was waiting for Dr Who to come on. In fact, I’m sure I’ve blogged this before – I just couldn’t find it when I took a quick root around.
(It’s not quite the first page of my notebook, but it is the first page of the notebook where I remembered to have the watercolours to hand. I had a series of trips out where I would get to a nice spot, sit down, take out my notebook and then swear like a sailor when I realised the watercolours were still at home. I’ve solved this problem by keeping a really tidy kit bag of drawing stuff that I usually take out with me.)
Up next, the last page of this sketchbook:
I’m obviously feeling a lot more confident. I’ve tried to suggest the individual parts of the vegetation, and the flowers. Hurrah for me! Also, there’s no scribbles in the margin.
This is the first of my warm-up pad sketches. I really wanted to just carry around one pad, but I found that having another pad to “warm up” in, before I started painting with watercolours, was really useful.
The 27th of June was really, really hot, and I took a trip to Hitchin to visit my favourite local art shop, Tims. I did this quick sketch of the train station on the way home, so as to break in the new pad (and test the paper). I have a lot of sketches of Hitchin train station’s north-bound platform, although it is exceedingly dull, as I am always missing the train back and having to find some way to fill my time.
Finally, the last page is the drawings of moorhen chicks I posted a few days ago (so I won’t stick it back up). I think that pencil is ok for sketching in, but I’m really trying to do a lot more drawing in pen after looking at Chris Ware’s sketchbooks, kindly lent to me by Stuart (do check out his cartoon blog!), which makes scanning a lot easier.
It’s really easy to feel that you’re just spinning your wheels, or that you’ve plateaued. If that’s the case for you, maybe pull out some old work from a few months ago – whatever it is, technical or creative – and take a look over it. I’ll bet you’ll have moved on more than you know.
The top picture is an example of the watercolour style known as “wet on wet”. That’s when you paint on (or next to?) wet areas, and the pigments in the paint smoosh around all over the page.
I’d gone back to Iver’s Field, and was keeping an eye on the nest of moorhens. Rather than jumping over the fence I took the daring action of sitting on the bridge, in view of the suburban neighbours, and started painting. I’m trying to work a little bigger, in the hope that I’ll make better pictures, but I was so annoyed by what I made that I ended up closing the sketchbook and coming home. Because I did this, the paint squished and smooshed in special ways, and made the darker patterns you can see…
The bottom two images are of the tree I normally draw, and the moorhen nest. As I was drawing the moorhen, fuzzy moorhen chicks would appear in the evening light, and disappear under the mother moorhen’s belly.
It’s funny, because I was really happy with those sketches, and totally bummed out about the paintings I did. But actually, they both seem ok – I was just being overly judgemental! You can also see a pair of thumbnails I did, trying to work out the composition of the larger painting. I’m not sure it made a huge difference to the final piece, but it’s something that all the pros seem to recommend.
On Monday I went to London with Becky and Naomi. Going out with other people means that I don’t usually get to do as much sketching as I might like, but I managed to cram in a couple of bits at the courtyard of the V&A.
Apparently, while I was doing this – and cursing my inability to capture the building better – a woman came and craned over me. So intent was I on getting this quick watercolour done that I didn’t notice! Then we went to see the dinosaur exhibition at the Natural History Museum, which wasn’t that cool because it cost a lot and was full of people touching stuff. However, we did see the Spirit Collection Tour, which was ace, and involved seeing loads of animals in jars. Including an eight meter long giant squid. If you get a chance, go!
This week, I’ve been really tired, but wanting to improve my watercolour skills. When I feel like that, I walk down the road to a field on my estate. There is a wooden bridge that goes over a stream, and an old cattle field that isn’t used anymore. I sit in the field, a bit away from my estate, and try and draw the trees.
Recently, there have been a few nesting moorhens on the stream. As I hopped over the gate, back onto the field, there was a black cat sitting on a tree-stump, eyeballing the two moorhen chicks. I threw a stone at it, but when I went back the next day, I could only see one chick.
In the pictures above, I was trying to paint the clouds – which are really the most impressive feature of Iver’s Field. I know it’s called Iver’s field, because when I went back the next day, there was a guy taking photos of the amazing pink sky we had yesterday. He told me about living here before my estate was built, and about paddling around over the fields in a canoe he had. It sounded ace! I think we should have more canoe travelling in the area.
