11 posts tagged “drawing”

Left to right: Comic relief: Beetlejuice (T. Burton); Smartypants: Lovejoy (J. Gash); Leader: Reginald Jeeves (PG Wodehouse); Warrior: Yanez de Gomera (E. Salgari); Hottie: Simon Templar (L. Charteris)

1. Print out photo on adhesives, not knowing how the pic will split when you unpeel each sticker.
2. Stick stickers (heh) in your sketchbook.
3. Draw around & over them.
4. Watercolour the thing. (not there yet, as you can see)
5. Feel good about yourself.

Since I don't really have time for drawings - the above are all digital (ok, the colouring is, except the background in #3, that's collage), an indulgence in restful moments - I hid all my materials in large boxes which I stored in such a way that I can't really be bothered to retrieve them. And today I bought some tempera and watercolours. Heaven help me.

As I wrote before, I'd bought a watercolour paper Moleskine notebook because they seem to have quite a following, at least from what I could tell looking at Flickr groups, and communities elsewhere.
I don't know how I feel about it. The paper is of good quality, very sturdy (good because I tend to molest paper a lot), as is the notebook itself - you can bend it and drop it and hack at it with a dying UniPin pen (I swear by those) and it'll live. Very nice. But I have a problem with the format: I don't mind small note- or sketchbooks but these really are too narrow for my hand. (Not so much because I have chubby hands but because I like to sweep around whether in writing or drawing.)
I think I'l stick with my Wire-O Winsor & Newtons, but in the meantime have an imaginary landscape under heavy rain, drawn during my latest flight to London after we were told what kind of weather expected us at Stansted. It wasn't so bad in the end, but I like the drawing anyway.

I went to London on the 23rd - the day of the 11th International Sketch Crawl - and since I only flew in late in the afternoon, I decided to sketch until I crawl for the duration of my trip. On the 24th I stumbled into the launching of this year's Big Draw which was an unbelievable streak of fortune, and had the pleasure of watching famous cartoonists at work, talking to folks from the Royal Watercolour Society, trying my hand at a variety of drawing challenges, and enjoying myself immensely as I drew people drawing other people and whatnot. On the 25th and the 26th I used my free time to see & sketch scenes and items from parks and museums, and on the 27th, the day of my return, I only kept a pen besides my sketchbook near to practice a technically spartan but no less involving approach.

Since I'm very tired I scanned the 30 filled pages quickly and didn't bother cropping or calibrating the images to look more like the real thing on paper, but it may be precisely this attitude that's closer to the quick improvisations that these 'draw as you go' sketches really are. The materials I used were black UniPin waterproof pens, Rotring ArtPens with black non-waterproof ink, a set of Derwent watercolour pencils, some 3B-6B pencils, two old watercolour brushes, and a bottle of White-Out because as much as I don't believe in erasers and correcting drawings (I much prefer to integrate the error with the developing image), I love using this liquid instead of white tempera for highlights and general madness. I drew in a spiral-bound medium weight Winsor & Newton sketchbook. I bought a Moleskine with watercolour paper to see why they're so popular and I did like it, but I'm still most loyal to W&N.

Thus! Page I of thumbnails leading to the drawings and descriptions, and Page II. Hope you like them, and even more so I hope to share more with you for the next SketchCrawl. Do join in!