Today’s variation

_20200721_233830

Work for my course. Take four images, a person walking, an animal, a recognisable plane and a building or part of a building. Three of them are mine and the fourth is a fellow student. I turned the images into tarot cards this time. I enjoyed doing this one. I tried to make it more coherent than the other three I’ve done. I’ve also got an usk challenge to do. I might try and get it done today.

X

Second idea

_20200719_165850

Fireworks. That’s what this is called. This is my second variation using four initial A6 images on an A3 page. I played with the background I did yesterday, with more black ink, more shading, but I added iridescent white to brighten plus thin strips of paper to try and make little explosions to brighten it.

Next step may be to swap a couple of images. I might cut into one or two of them. We will see….

Backgrounds

I’m working on a background to place my four images on fro my illustration course.

_20200718_165155

I will be cutting this up into four. I think the cat and the man will be at the bottom and the tree and the house at the top. My idea is that it will be November fifth. Bonfire night. The man is looking for the cat, which is scared. The house and the tree are going to be at the top. I will then colour round the blobs in black so that it’s nighttime. I might use fine liner pens to make the background black but with texture…

Got to decide portrait or landscape? What do you think?

X

Round the corner

_20200716_195201

Today’s Urban sketchers challenge Stoke-on-Trent was ’round the corner’ so I drew the yard looking out of the back door.

The yard is full of hanging baskets and pots as you will have seen on a previous post. I guess I could have gone out and drawn the main road round the corner from my street. But this is a more pleasant view. Hard to draw all the leaves and flowers. You find yourself losing the detail as you draw more of them. I have to bring my mind back and fight against going into autopilot mode. Controlling where the pen moves instead of just scribbling.

X

Four faces

 

sketch-1553378526940

Four faces on a black and white pattern I made on the phone. Each face was drawn by my finger on the screen. I definitely think I have a style that I draw in. Not anything recognisable like anime. Just my way of doing things. They say though, that there’s nothing new under the sun. So I wonder if there are any artists that do this kind of thing. Maybe it’s a bit too unfinished but you don’t learn unless you try different things.

X

Walking around and about.

sketch-1594487524505

Don’t worry I said, I know where I’m going… We walked up one moorland fell and down into the valley of the next. Walking on tussock grass was hard on the legs, each lump was seperate from the next. The ground was springy with matted sphagnum moss as well.

The sun was getting lower in the sky. The path was hard to follow, and I was getting nervous. We hadn’t seen anyone in our travels and I could not see the road that led to our destination. Matt had parked his car next to a pub on the moorland road and we were heading vaguely west towards the setting sun.

It was then that Matt had the brilliant idea of looking at the map. He’d not bothered earlier, but now it was getting late and drinking time was running out. We all peered over the map, Matt muttered something as he looked over it. What did you say? I asked. Just follow the cat he laughed. There laid out in front of us was a dotted line, following the contours of the fells. Definitely cat shaped. And as I looked I could see the pub marked just where its up raised paw was swiping at the string, the line that indicated the road!

Matt laughed. We’ll be there in ten minutes. Cheers I said. Let’s go.

What I see in maps (and other things)

sketch-1594487524505

I took another look at this post about map reading and suddenly saw a cat. I’ve written about finding things in wallpaper, or ink blots or all sorts of different things including the front and back of cars. Grilles on cars can look like grinning mouths, headlights like eyes. I love seeing animals and faces and objects in clouds. Sometimes it drives me mad when I see something over and over again. Once seen, never forgotten. Life is strange, the mind is stranger.

X

Quick figures

_20200711_000836

Quick sketches of figures while I sat on a roundabout in the park yesterday. I added a little dog, sitting next to one of them. And an older female figure stooped over. Our project this week at college was to do various things, including drawing a person walking. I must do a better job, but these were a couple of minutes each, max.

They could be neat and tidy, but you can’t nail people down to make them still when you try and draw them.

X