"DAD"

"DAD"

It's been a while since I last played with my pencils, January last year to be precise. but I felt the sudden urge to dust them off and tackle a portrait of my father who we lost last year. Dad has figured in my blog many times over the years. He was a keen woodworker who, although he lacked precision woodworking skills, nevertheless managed to "knock together" some fine pieces. My garden still holds a Gazebo, wooden bench, pair of wooden chairs with matching table, a dovecote, a small log cabin, a decorative wheelbarrow planter, a Train planter and numerous bird tables and nesting boxes. Most of them have been posted here at one time or another. His last piece (made in his 95th year) was a Dolls house mackled together from bits of old plywood, and it came complete with items of furniture fashioned from off-cuts of which there was always plenty strewn around his shed floor. He was extremely pleased with the Dolls house and wanted to give it to a local nursery or play group but it really wasn't good enough for that .... too many unfinished edges and dangerous corners for it to be safe for little people to play with. To ease his disappointment I told him I'd love to have it in my garden as a feature amongst my plants and he seemed to like the idea, so it has stood proudly in one of my flower beds for the last 2/3 years.

I'll be coming back to the Dolls House and it's contents in a future post. In the meantime I knocked out this small pen sketch by way of saying "Merry Christmas" to all my followers.


You're comments and encouragement are very important to me and I can't tell you how much I appreciate your continued support.


Merry Christmas one and all.

Ink & Coloured Pencils

As I sat watching television a few evenings ago I drew this Robin in my sketchbook using Pen & Ink. I wanted to see if I could demonstrate it was a Robin just by tonal values alone. There is hardly any difference between the tonal values of his red breast and his brown feathers when viewed in greyscale so I tried to exaggerate the tones in my drawing but it didn't work too well.

Dissatisfied with the result and thinking he didn't really look like a Robin I decided to add some colour using coloured pencils. I liked this effect very much and I think that is probably because the ink drawing was a finished piece in it's own right, rather than just the preliminary stage of something more. This became more apparent when I drew the Chaffinch and Blue Tit. They don't work as well, in my opinion, because they have much less ink detail which is probably because I was well aware at the ink stage that colour was too follow.

I liked the effect of the Ink with Coloured Pencil so much that I went back to a couple of previous pen drawings and added colour to them in the same way. Though I always like them in their original ink form (yes, I actually said "I liked them" lol) I have to say that I like them even more with the added colour. Oh, I didn't risk ruining the original pen drawings as I printed them out and worked on the copies. This is definitely a mixed media that I will work with again.

"Bear"

No, not a big brown grizzly from the deep, dark, dangerous recesses of Whipsnade Zoo but my sisters Long-Haired Collie dog called "Bear".

Though I've tried using coloured pencils before I really haven't managed very well with them. My main problem has been blending and I suspect that is because I expected colours to mix as they do with watercolours, and the pencil strokes to smooth out as they do with graphite. Of course, neither is true. A short while ago I decided to have another go with coloured pencils and chose an old photo of "Bear" as my subject. This time I feel the penny dropped with regards to the blending and mixing and I achieved a result I'm not displeased with.

The picture is now framed and has been handed over to my sister who seems to be delighted with it. A good result all round. ;-)

Lychgate

In an attempt to further reduce the tightness in my work I set myself a limited time to attempt this pen drawing of a Lychgate. Though I'm pleased with much of the pen work, especially the shadows and textures, my hasty sketching has resulted in some poor perspectives. It's clear that even a relaxed and loose style still needs attention to detail at the outline stage. Relaxed and loose must never mean careless .... another lesson learned.

For those interested, the word 'lych' is an old English word meaning 'corpse'. In the middle ages, when bodies were often only wrapped in shrouds, the corpse would be placed on a bier (a flat-framed stand) under the lychgate from where the priest would conduct the first part of the funeral ceremony. It's interesting that these small structures with such a unhappy function should these days often prove to be a popular backdrop for wedding photo's. This particular lychgate stands at the entrance to the church I was married in some 43 years ago and most of our wedding photo's were taken in front of it.

Like many of you, when I'm out and about I take photo's of scenes and objects that I would like to paint or draw one day. I took this photo in 2004 for that very reason, which just goes to prove that I get there eventually. ;-)

Snowy Cottage

As I've mentioned in previous posts, when working with pen & ink I'm currently experimenting at achieving a good tonal range and shading without using too much cross-hatching, if any. In addition, a couple of posts ago, in a comment about one of my drawings,  Keith referred to 'lost and found lines' and this has also been on my mind as I'm not sure I've ever understood exactly what is meant by 'lost and found lines', though common sense sort of suggests what the term means.

Yesterday I came across a photograph of a small snow-covered cottage and, while thinking about how it might be drawn using pen & ink, realised that it was a great subject to work with both zero-hatching and 'lost and found' lines. Of course, the secret to drawing snow is more about what you don't draw than what you do.

Canal Cottages

Back in 2007, to mark my 60th birthday, my family treated me to a day on the canal. Fortunately it was "on" and not "in". The canal is the Grand Union and they hired a barge for the day and I was in my element navigating the calm waters. This stretch of the canal includes the famous mile-long tunnel near Blisworth which, in days gone by, were navigated by the bargee's laying on top of the barges and "walking" their feet along the roof of the tunnel. Fortunately for us our barge had an engine but the tunnel is only just wide enough for two barges to pass, so steering for a novice was exhilarating to say the least.

In my last post I mentioned how I was concerned over my use of hatching, in particular that it looks unnatural .... rigid, clinical diagonal lines ... and this is probably down to my inexperience. To explore this further I decided I ought to try a pen drawing with no hatching, achieving tones in a different, more natural way. I've painted this scene before and it struck me as being ideal for my purpose. I'm not displeased with the result and am happy that there's not one area of regular hatching. Now I'm keen to try another. ;-)

Tempus fugit and all that.

It's been over 4-months since I last posted. In my last post I mentioned that summer was almost here, and as I write this I can't help but notice that it's now over. I also note that my last post said I was determined to do some urban sketching this summer but I've failed miserably and haven't ventured out with my sketchbook once. What happened to the summer? 

That said, I am recently back from a wonderful holiday in Northumberland during which I succeeded in sketching en plein air on several occasions. I sketched Bamburgh Castle in the rain, the Millenium Bridge in Newcastle in the sunshine and Lindisfarne Castle on a dry but cold and windy day. Yep, British weather at it's best. The sketch of Warkworth Castle was a bit of a cheat as I used a tourist leaflet as a source of reference. 

Keen to pursue my interest in Pen and Ink work I recently tackled this picture of Willy Lott's Cottage. I'm sure you're all familiar with it but for anyone who isn't, Willy Lott's Cottage was made famous by John Constable in his painting "The Hay Wain", and he included it in a number of his other works too. It is in Flatford, Suffolk, which was an area Constable painted frequently.

Pen and Ink seems to be my preferred medium at this time and I'm keen to progress it. Although I'm feeling much more competent with the medium than I ever did with watercolour I still feel that my marks, especially hatching, have a 'novice' look to them. Hopefully, the more I do, the more 'natural' the marks will look. With fingers crossed I shall march onwards and upwards as this is a medium I'm really feeling at home with. ;-)

Web sites and stuff.

Good grief, it's been over 2 months since I last posted .... doesn't time fly when you're working your socks off? LOL.

As most of us know, it's that time of year when our gardens beckon and anyone with a 'formal' garden will know just how much post-winter tidying up and spring weeding, trimming and pruning is necessary. My greenhouse is bulging at the seams both with tender plants that have overwintered in there, and with new plants born from cuttings. I'm an old fashioned gardener so won't plant out any tender plants before the end of May. Nearly there!!!

We have also decided to have a new kitchen so remodelling has also been high on the agenda. I'm needing to finish painting the hall and passageway now that our new Front and back doors have been fitted but progress is being made as I spend sunny days outside and wet ones inside. Sometimes I feel like the little man in one of those old Swiss Weather Cottage ornaments. LOL.

On top of everything else I've also been fixing my web site - JWJonline. Google recently announced that they would be giving less importance in their search results to sites that were not 'Mobile Friendly'. They use all sorts of complicated expressions like 'Responsive Design' but what it really comes down to is a flexible layout that looks good on any size screen. At first I ignored this 'advice' but eventually looked closely at the statistics for my site and found that my traffic is fairly equally split three ways, one third from phones, one third tablets and one third desktops, This is a massive change even over the last 12-months.

With 2/3rds of my traffic coming from mobile devices I decided I had to deal with the matter. For template-based sites run by hosting companies there is little the end-user can do to alter the technical structure of the site but for someone who has built their own site from scratch, as I have, the ball is firmly in my own court. It's been necessary to look up lots of things and my learning curve has been steep, but I'm there now and very happy with the results ..... fonts rescale, images rescale and text moves fluidly around the screens. Whether you view my site on a phone, tablet or desktop, the pages ought to look good. (Let me know if you see something that could be improved). I have to applaud Google for providing some extremely useful tools especially one that allows a desktop user to see how his site looks on any other device.

So, while all of this has been going on I haven't been able to do much art. I've occasionally spent a little time doing ink sketches, such as this tree, old rowing boat and village green, just to keep my hand in, but 'serious' art has had to take a back seat. Still, summers almost here, the web site is virtually finished, the garden will soon be looking after itself and the kitchen won't take forever, and then I'll be out in the summer sun with my sketchbook as I'm determined to do some urban sketching this year.

Eilean Donan Castle

You may recall from my last post that I did a practice piece of this castle a few weeks ago. Since then I've been working on the drawing proper. This is much larger than I usually work (on 16" x 12" Daler-Rowney Heavyweight paper) and it's surprised me as to how much longer a large drawing takes compared to a smaller one. I suppose it should have been obvious but there's a lot of little pen marks in this drawing. A picture twice the size seems to have taken 8 times longer to do.

Another 'first' for me was that I used several reference photo's. With shadows, lack of colour and a flat grainy photograph I found some of the details difficult to put into perspective, but having several photo's taken at different times of day and from different viewpoints enabled me to get a better understanding of how the various walls and buildings fit together.

As I stated in my previous post, this particular view of the castle isn't quite balanced as the bridge runs out too far to the right leaving a large empty space to the right of the castle. I had intended to use artistic licence to insert a tree into that space to balance things up but I've changed my mind and cropped the picture to exclude one of the bridge spans. A few birds in the empty space adds some balance.

I'm really pleased that I did the practice piece (something else I don't usually bother with) as it helped me understand which hatching/shading worked and which didn't. I didn't want to make the hatching obvious and believe that if done right it should blend seamlessly into the whole.

For anyone interested I've put a Work In Progress page on my main website showing the various steps.

Practice makes perfect?

Following my recent small Pen & Ink drawings I wanted to try something more ambitious and decided to attempt this Mill which sits on the River Avon at Tewkesbury. The Mill is mainly brick built but the centre structure on legs, the small attic rooms and the small building to the right (also on legs) are made of white painted timber. The roofs are tiled and the water is wet. Regrettably I messed it up within the first couple of pen strokes but I'd spent so long drawing it out in pencil I hadn't got the heart to scrap it and start again so decided to use it as a practice piece. I wanted to better understand how to using hatching to depict brickwork, timber, tiles, water and so on, so a few wonky roof lines and wobbly windows weren't going to make a lot of difference to my learning process. Apart from the bad bits I'm not displeased with it and it was certainly a fabulous piece to practice on. The hatching and shading disguised a multitude of sins and I learned a great deal from doing it.

My next piece was specifically done as a practice piece. One of my all time favourite places even though I haven't been there yet (it's on my bucket list) is Eilean Donan Castle in Scotland. I've decided that I'd like to draw it in Pen & Ink but to do justice to it, I think it needs to be a large drawing so as to allow for plenty of detail. To enable me to appreciate how best to hatch in the darks and shadows and to aid in the overall composition of the drawing, I decided to do a smaller (10" x  8") practice piece.

As usual, some of my verticals aren't vertical but that doesn't stop the practice piece from serving it's purpose very well. This particular composition is too wide. I don't like the way the bridge hangs out on it's own to the right, yet I feel the bridge is an important feature. I'll look at other options but I'm thinking artistic licence could bless me with a large Oak tree to the right of the castle. I'm pleased with the shading of the end gable of the building on the left but many other areas don't work as well as I'd hoped. I didn't want to overdo the diagonal hatching and I've achieved that, and I've also achieved a 'stone' appearance to the castle, however I think I need to have another practice run to try out some other effects.

They say "Practice makes perfect". It doesn't always ..... but it sure as heck helps. ;-)