Tone

My focus for this week is on tone, atmosphere, environments and capturing people playing. Quite a list. Plus I have to get 'toys' in there somewhow. To practice I've done two drawings using the Derwent watersoluble GRAPHtone pen which I'm liking a lot. These don't have toys in, I'm focusing on getting fast at doing environments with tone. I think these took about an hour each.

Toys

Beginning the Toy project, I started with a little red wind up toy and ended with a pastel redering of a Gloomy Bear on my bedroom floor. The pictures going down are reverse chronological, so the top one here is the latest.


Using oils for the second time , here are the red wind-up toy bear and the blue soft toy rabbit. Unfortunately I ruined the painting a bit when I scanned it, but not very badly.


The blue rabbit done in pastels. This took about 2 hours I think as each hair was drawn to match the direction of hair on the actual toy. I should really have put a background in for this to make it look more complete.

A pastel study of the red bear composed as a lose narrative.


Early colour test of the bear using pastels and crayons.


Trying out different ways to get down the form in an interesting way. Pen, crayon, pencil, pastel.


A sketch of a display in forbidden planet.

Oh Pollocks

This week has been fairly busy. After one of my tutors, James Mayhew, astutely observed that my work didn't show much enthusiasm and that I was trying to be a good student of art rather than letting myself go and just doing what felt natural (I'm paraphrasing, he was much more eloquent than this), I've had to rethink my project. I thought toys would be fun, but they didn't sound like a serious thing to do. I was still in my 'good student' mind set. Then the next day I happened to see a 2nd year MA student's work and it really impressed me. Coincidentaly, he'd chosen toys when he's done the module I'm doing. On Saturday I went to Pollocks Toy museum which is near Goodge Street Station in London.

I was there about 3 hours and I don't feel like I got much done in that time. Below is probably the best drawing I did there, which happened to be the first too. It's not so easy to see, but the Robot was fun to do. It was reflective silver, I'm not sure if it looks that way in the drawing or not.

Then I went to Hamleys and drew kids. I don't recommend that any men with beards do this on their own, you'll get some very suspicious looks from parents. After that I met with Wayne and we went to the Tate and some great art shops and saw 'The King' at the NFT.

Sunday was at the Zoo. Again the first drawing is the only one I'll post, the others got worse and worse. Not sure if this was flagging enthusiasm or just being tired, I'd been walking almost constantly for 14 hours on Saturday.

Costumes and nudes

On Monday we get a taught life drawing class all day from 10am to 5pm (with one hour break). It's very good. However, this Monday the model didn't turn up in the morning so we had volunteers from the class to pose. Below is one of the students from two angles. We had three models and drew each from different angles. Then we had to use our imagination and draw them in new positions and/or from different angles. A good excercise.

In the afternoon a girl turned up who had never modelled before. Carlos (the tutor) got her to wear a dress from about 1850 or so, lots of frills. This was done with brush pen and a pencil for lighter shading.


This morning was unsupervised life drawing where a model comes in and organises the class her(or him)self, although we can suggest poses if we want. I tried a few different ways to draw her this time. I think all of these were 5 minute poses... maybe the last one was longer.

Charcoal


Contti pastel and brush pen.

Two Contti pastels and brush pen (what a difference!)


Brush pen.

Busy

Lots of life drawing and a few other bits since my last post. I filled up about a sketch book full of drawings. Here are some excerpts.

This girl was asleep on a chair in a bookshop. It would be difficult to draw her asleep if I went and asked her if it was OK first, so I did this without permission.


A guy looking reading a book. Exciting stuff isn't it.


I went to London Zoo on Sunday with Emily (a part time student also on the course). We didn't have much time there (due mainly to train problems and a terrible bus service) so these had to be rushed a little.


Quick sktches of a giraffe. They move around a lot, or at least the did when I was there.


Zebra's were slightly less flighty.


The Ring Tailed Lemurs were full of character, despite being locked away in a fairly small cage.


The Meerkats seemed most happy probably becase their space was large enough for them to run around in. And they ran a lot, they didn't stay still for more than a split second.

Rescue

Suddenly, I feel like I'm starting to get a feel for colour. Still lots to learn obviously, but I like the tones in this one. Maybe the yellow is too bright?


Slightly more abstract. I prefer the composition of this one though.

Play

I found some lovley work on deviantart from wetnosebaby and tried out the style for myself. Her work is better (and original) so check it out.


Quick 2 colour sketch. I was going for something else but didn't like the character much so did this instead.


No idea where this came from.

Developing a mood

I can't just do observation work, I'll go mad. The other side of my coursework is 'Experimentation', so hopefully this will fit into that and also tie into my project themes. Here I've tried to get a mood across and also tried to find colours that work well together.

Use Ink

My tutor (Hannah) saw last weeks work (not pictured here, very bad work) and recommended I just use pen and ink. I haven't got the right pen yet, so instead I've been using the brush pen which I hope has the same effect she wanted. She suggested it so that I develop more confidence in my line work, so something permanent and unremovable would force me to make bolder strokes.

This is Terror - the cat - sleeping on my bed.


Bella the bass.


Messy art stuff on a little chest of draws.

'Brush' pens

A fellow student (I think it was Biddy?) recommended trying out these new brush pens. They say on the side they are made by Tomboy ABT. I bought an N51 (dark-medium grey) and a 250 (lightish green). I didn't like the 250 so I later bought a 062 (Yellow), but I didn't have it for these sketches. I also bought some Pastel paper with assorted colour paper sheets.

At lunch I quickly knocked these up, both views from a little square near the building I'm studying.



I tried to get a good perspective on this one, but messed up a bit and lost the feeling I wanted to get across.


The brush pen is great though, I'd recommend any artist to go out and buy one and give it a go.

Life Drawing

Today I attended the free life drawing session at the ARU and it was really good. The model was very organised, picked her own poses and set the time. We sat and drew. Having a time limit was very useful as I didn't have time to think and I think this benefited my drawing considerably. The room was packed (about 12-16 of us) but the model said there's rarely more than 3 or 4.

This one below was done using a sepia drawing dark sketching pencil. 30 minute pose.

5 minutes, cool gey Pro Marker pen


10 minutes (I think) Cool grey marker again (contrast has been boosted in photoshop, it's not as black as this)


5mins sepia.


10 mins marker.


10mins marker.

Another comparison

I've been doing some more experimental art for another web site and wasn't indending to put any on this one. However, I think it might be useful to show what I've been up to. I painted this image in Art Rage 2 in about 10-30 minutes. I wasn't keeping track of time, but it was a lot of fun as it wasn't serious and I got to play with the mixing of paints and so on.


Then my mum came over (she teaches art) and I asked her to show me how I might get the same picture done in acrylic. I tried to match it as close as possible to get a good comparison of methods.

The acrylic painting had all sorts of problems.

First of all, the black outlines were put in last, which I didn't like as I had nothing to base my background on. I could have put the black outline in first, but it would have soon disappeared under the paint. In AR2 I simply put the black outlines on the top layer and painted on the layer below.

Secondly: Matching the colour took a very long time indeed, and it was still off by quite a way. We used quite a lot of paint too and it was hard to judge how much to mix.

Third: Even using acrylics it took quite a while for the last layer to dry so that the next layer could be put on. In AR2, you can select quick dry paint if you want, or just jump to another layer.

Fourth: Mixing real paint on the canvas seemed to much harder than in AR2, although my experience of oils I remember being better than acrylics.

Fifth: No Undo. If I made a mistake in AR2, I can easily go back. No such luck in the real world.

Sixth: The colours just aren't as punchy.

Plus, with AR2 I have all the brushes I need just a gesture away, in real life, I only have a few.

In all the acrylic + Marker pen painting took around 4 hours compared with 10-30 minutes in AR2.

So my second comparison still makes me think AR2 is the better tool for the job. Unfortunately it's very slow on my machine at resolutions much bigger than screen resolution, I'm hoping this will be fixed in the new version coming out soon.