Tag: Drawing

Old cars and engines

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Today I had a break from my exhibition for an hour, so I went and sketched a few of the classic cars. I have to say there were a lot of Austin and Morris cars, plus things like the Scimitar car that I drew.

Each sketch took between 10 and 15 minutes. I tried to be accurate, but when you are standing in a field with cars or engines, people have a tendancy to walk in front of you or stand in the way.

Drawing is slow motion photography I guess you could say, you click a camera, but your hand and eyes have the effort of coordinating to get an image. It’s not easy to draw a new subject. Wheels can be too big or small. A bumper might be too high up, and cut across where the radiator grill should go. Also when you use a thin nibbed pen you have the difficulty of getting dark areas without wanting to spend ages cross hatching.

Movement is another problem, while drawing the diesel engine I tried to get a feeling if the spinning motion, but it started to get messy. There are so many pipes and wheels and tubes. I have no idea what bit does which action, its hard to link things up in your head.

Anyway I took photos of the cars for comparison, I may paint some of them.

Kitty cats

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Kitty little, kitty life,

Kitty food, kitty moods,

Cat paws, cat whiskers,

Cat nose, cat eyes.

Moggie purrs, Moggie snores,

Moggie paws, moggie ears,

Feline mind, feline fine,

Feline playing, feline leaps

Felix chase, Felix eat,

Felix fly, Felix fur…

Cats at home, cats in the garden,

cats up trees, cats chase toys.

Beautiful, soft, fluffy and fierce,

Cats are my friends for life….

Youdraw pictures

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Imagine a website where you can only draw in a small oblong in portrait mode. Imagine you only have a thick and thin black pen and a thick and thin white eraser. Then imagine drawing complicated images with only these tools.

That’s Youdraw, I don’t go on it anymore because my old computer is defunct and my tablet does not let me use a proper stylus pen.

The images above are my drawings, taken from the site and then changed in Photoshop so that I could colour them.

I found it captivating to be able to use the site to  draw so many ideas. The shape was better suited to portraiture, but you could fit landscapes in, abstract ideas, botanical images, anything black and white. Some of the artists there could draw incredibly detailed pictures, one person at least built up a huge interconnected picture of 100 images, maybe more.

If you go and have a look at Youdraw.com you can see what is there now.  I’m not sure if its still taking images. The plan was to collect 500,000 drawings to publicise the population explosion on Earth.

Hopefully I will go back and draw there again one day.

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Archery today

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We started going to archery a few months ago, but had to stop because I got busy doing art, or visiting relatives, and Richards back has been playing up.

So we decided to go back today. It was overcast and a bit blustery but we were only shooting arrows over about 20 yards, which isn’t far, even with the junior 16 pound bows we were using. I managed to get a gold and so did my partner, but we were watching the other archers, who are more experienced, shoot 50 and 80 yards.

I decided to have a try at 50 yards, you have to elivate the bow more,  I ended up aiming at the roof of a house. I actually managed to hit the target after trying several shots that either went short or left of the target. As the morning passed we were both getting closer to the gold  (center of the target ).

It’s surprising how tiring it us pulling even a low poundage bow, some if the people there were pulling 40 pound bows. But looking back in history archers could pull far heavier bows than that. They started around age 4 and were given 4 arrows. They then has to practice every day. Archers ended up with massive muscles and deformed backs because of the strain they were putting on them.

At the end of the session we were shooting at the 80 yard target, I was getting tired and my bow arm kept dropping, but despite not hitting the target I was making he distance. My arrows wavered and wiggled as they flew through the air, but they got there. I was shooting with sites but they didn’t help much. I just had to vaguely aim at a clump of trees.

I think we will go back next week….

Visiting the Moon

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Today we visited the museum of the Moon, an art installation which is on till tomorrow. We got in free but there have been events there that you had to pay for.

The Moon is a huge inflated sphere, a balloon, hung from the ceiling of the Kings Hall in Stoke-upon-trent, part of Stoke’s town hall.

I’m afraid I didn’t get the details of the artist who made it, but it is very beautiful. The Moon is fully rendered with all its craters and mare (or seas). The seas are actually flattened areas where magma or lava has welled up from the interior and flowed out across the Moon’s surface. They are caused because of the speed of impact from asteroids and meteors hitting the Moon, the energy of momentum is converted into kinetic, heat, energy.

But thats the side we see, because the Moon is tidally locked with us, so the face we see is always pointed towards the Earth. If you observe the Moon over time it swings and sways so you can see slightly more than 50% of the Moon but we never see the back. The sides, top and bottom is squashed up so its not easy to distinguish what is visible.

So walking around the installation you can see things you might only have seen in blurry film from the Apollo missions almost 50 years ago. Huge craters where impacts must have shook the Moon to its core. You realise how much more scarred and cratered the dark side of the Moon is. Pitted and dented, the back of it has been impacted over millennia.

The Moon has also slowed the Earths spin which is why when humans are shut away in dark caves to experiment with our body clocks, we think a day ends after 23 hours or so. That is because as we evolved over millions of years the Moon was orbiting the Earth closer to us, and as it moved away gradually  (less than a centimetre a year?) it slowed the Earths’ spin to 24 hours a day.

At the moment the Sun can be eclipsed by the Moon. It just happens that the Moon is 400 times closer to us than the Sun and 400 times smaller. So the Moon appears to be exactly the right size to cover the Sun when there is an eclipse. As time goes by the Moon will move further out and “perfect” eclipses will end. Finally the Moon will break away from the Earth. When that happens the Earths rotation will become chaotic. It already spins on an axis that is tipped over at about 23°. If the Moon flys off into space its gravity will no longer help hold the Earth steady. Who knows we could end up tipped right over.

I’m not an expert so my figures might not be completely accurate. If you want more information please check out Astronomy websites.

The Museum of the Moon is an installation run be Appetite. They help produce various arts projects over the year. We also heard diary entries from the First world war, and a dance performance called “in Flanders feilds.”

I drew the Moon because my camera isn’t good in low light levels. The juxtaposition of the Moon installation and the old Kings Hall made for a marvellous and eerie afternoon out.

Llandegla fishery

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Up in the hills between Ruthin and Wrexham in north wales is a little fishery called Llandegla. Its almost at the top of the hill  before you get to the top then drop down into Wrexham, on the road, on the left hand side ( there is another fishery further down the road on a side road).

There’s a cafe and camp site for small caravans in the grounds of the fishery and the opportunity to catch fish if you want (Vegetarians look away now).

We had lunch there, hot smoked trout with new potatos and mixed leaf salad, which was delicious.

I kept up my habit of sketching, and did a few pictures, one of them I gave away because a boy there was interested in doing art.

So day trips continue, where will we go tomorrow?

Rain

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It’s a bank holiday Sunday and normal service has resumed (it’s raining) whether the weather on bank holiday Monday improves again? Well the forecast says it will.

So anyway I thought you might like an interesting fact?

Raindrops are apparently not teardrop shaped! I guess we think they are because they speed by so fast, persistence of vision (the way our eyes track things) mean that they blur together so they look long and thin….Like, er, teardrops….. or raindrops trickling down a window as they smear themselves against the glass, wetting and sliding at the same time.

So what do raindrops really look like? On slow motion cameras they resolve into little oblate spheroids….Like little tangerine shaped water droplets, that’s because air resistance squashes them up slightly in the direction of travel.

Trouble (or not) is that I’m sure people will carry on drawing them as teardrop shapes because thats how they look to us….

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Rhyl Air show

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A sunny August bank holiday weekend, at least today, forecast is for rain tomorrow……

Rhyl beach is long and sandy, there were food stalls and lots of things on show including the RNLI and RAF and Royal British Legion for the Poppy appeal.

We walked along the coastal path, towards the town and watched planes zipping by, aerobatics, an old Blenheim and a couple of Spitfires. All free, and as we had walked down from my sisters house we didn’t have to pay for parking!

Rhyl airshow takes place every August Bank holiday, when a free show is held and the planes fly out over the sea. There can be big crowds but it was not bad today….lots of space on the sand and great viewing conditions.

First we saw a five plane aerobatic team, then an old autogyro from the 1960’s, later on old war planes, a Blenheim and a Dakota and two Spitfires. There were other planes following, looping the loop, doing stalls and twists, soon there was a fighter jet trainer shooting across the sky.

The climax was a team of around 6 red devil parachutists, falling from the sky with smoke trails. I say 6 as the sun was shining in my eyes and I could not see the screen of my phone. As there parachutes opened they also flew the welsh flag below them. Brilliant afternoon. I even got slightly sunburnt!

I managed to get a few reasonable photos on my old Samsung phone, I also did some quick sketches of the planes.

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Recent sketches.

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When you are out for lunch, or going for a day trip its good to ditch the camera sometimes and just sketch the view. It might end up a bit skewiff but that doesn’t matter, you are making personal memories, things to remember, like the way my friends hat dominated our table at a local restaurant Amore, in Newcastle-under-lyme or the fact I always seem to eat lunch before I think about recording what it looked like. We had a huge meal at the New Inn at Dyserth. Then drawing a view of a landmark, trying to catch its character and the sunlight hitting the tree trunk just at the right angle to cast its shadow on the huge stone walls behind it. Drawing the oddly angled steps that are made to bend round protruding rocks and the stone wall at Dyserth Falls…oh I cram a lot in on day trips!

 

Conwy sketches

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If you decide to take a day trip to Conwy, north Wales, on the other side of the estuary to Llandudno and the Great Orme mountain, can I suggest you don’t take a cheap sketchbook, an ok blunt pencil and a couple of old biros with you because you have forgotten your good drawing tools?

Firstly it doesn’t make drawing easy, particularly if you choose to walk along the battlements of a castle. If the sun does decides to shine then you can’t get dark enough shadows to show the foreground trees and you can’t get the subtlety of shading on the mist shrouded mountains in the distance. Each sketch becomes more random and quick. The only good one you give away to “Eric the storyteller” of snowdonian folk tales because you managed to capture a reasonable image of him.

Off down to the smallest house in Great Britain, built 400 years ago, now there is a house to draw. Luckily you dredge up an old black felt pen and make tentative marks. How to show how tiny the house is? The clue is to draw the welsh lady by the door, passing on wisdom and history. She is a good figure to add for a sense of scale. Mission accomplished while queuing to enter the house, the felt pen has run dry, but the image is clearer than the previous ones.

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