Stuart

I work in a shop in a poor part of my city, where there is a large retired/disabled/unemployed segment of society. One of the regulars in my shop is an old man called Stuart. Stuart spends all day, everyday, as far as I can tell, drinking in one of the five nearby pubs. He’s nice enough, causes no trouble , and though I’ve never seen him sober, he’s talkative and pleasant. Recently Stuart told me that he was – is – an artist himself and that he always loves to paint and draw. He was kind enough to pose for a photo when I mentioned that I was also an artist, and that I was interested in painting more and more portraits.

This was my project for today, starting at around about midday and working until about 4 o’clock this afternoon. First I sketch an outline in charcoal then filled in the picture with midtone colour. Finally I worked in the shades and highlights, which is certainly the longest part of the portrait – I think it must have taken me the last three hours of the painting.

Happy New Year

Scottish people typically go nuts on the drinking on Hogmanay. I love the peace on New Years Day I’m rarely ever hungover, and generally, most everyone else is. When it’s peaceful, drawing is meditative, and I revisit old themes and loved, well-worn ideas .

Another happy little commission

I got a commission to design the image for a logo for a local kickboxing club that seems to love English bulldogs.

Here are some of my sketches:

That last one is the beginning of my favourite one so far. I’ll keep you all updated as I work through the commission.

Continue to think in ink

It’s been a wild month for me recently, breaking away from my comfortable zones of pencil and paints, into the weird old world of pen, ink , lines and pure tone. I have experimented with hatching, cross hatching , pointillism, paint-on , brush , pen , dip-pen, brush-pen , and every permutation I can lay my hands on, with rough and smooth paper both. I have studied the work of Chris Riddell, Durer and Hogarth, and NOON, to name a few. I have begun to find my way in caricature, oddly enough, which turns out to be a great observation practise, see below

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but after a great deal of frustration and hard work, I think I’m beginning to find a voice in this medium. Presumably, like many things I do, I will abandon it for some other new idea once I feel like I have a hang of it.

I’ll keep you posted, internet.

I broke my ankle

While I was at the hospital for my ankle, I happened to draw some of the other folk in the waiting room. I recently coloured this one in using Staedler colour fine liners, in a sort-of pontillist technique, only with hatching in various colours. Also, not one of those colours is flesh colour – I had to make it up by basically going round the colour wheel, which was pretty fun, actually.

I drew a fish!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mzdial/8429357116/

I drew some fish. Recently, I’ve been working on learning how to work tonally with pens. It has been as hard and frustrating as I remember learning any new technique is, drawing things over and over , things not coming out like I wanted. The thing is, it’s especially annoying since I thought that I already knew how to do this.

Now, however , I think I am getting somewhere.
More coming later, no doubt.

While this technique isn’t directly applicable to my ultimate goal of tattooing, I figure that all the work I do improves my basic artistic skill, which will eventually make me better overall. All experience becomes useful eventually.

Sketchbook works once again

So much of my work, and I think most artists, is experimentation in the sketchbook, trying out hatching or pencil technique or something, some tiny variation. Here are a couple recent works in my sketchbook:

I rather like the idea that I could do alternative images for popular memes in my preferred style. I very well may. Stay tuned, pencileers!

Practising a fish

The other day, I realised I was terrible at drawing koi fish. Not thy I haven’t tried before – just that trial and error wasn’t teaching me fast enough. I googled for ‘koi fish scales drawing tutorial’, and found a few videos. I watched a couple to get the idea, but I didn’t copy what the video was doing.

So that’s what I came up with. The important thing to note to make the shape believable is that fish are, essentially, cylinders. When drawing cylinders, you always need shade on both edges of the cylinder, and an off-centre highlight. If anyone’s interested, I’ll do a post on how I constructed the fish body in much more detail.

Hands and Skulls

Hands are hard to draw, but they’re an important part of a common subject, so you have to do it sooner or later. I’m terrible at forgetting to practise them, so here’s a quick outline from the memory.

Also very interesting is drawing the paws and feet of other mammals and birds. Count the bones and joints, and you’ll see for yourself the amazing similarities between us and them.

Also:

I dunno what it is about skulls, but for me and a lot of other artists, they’re a go-to subject for all kinds of drawing, and especially when we’re experimenting. I don’t think it’s anything special about skulls per se, but that it’s memetic in artistic circles to use skulls as a subject.

Music and words

Like many people, I like music. I like a lot of different things – one of those things are American Country and Western like Tex Beneke . Like many people, I play a lot of instruments, and I like stringed instruments and I like to play Scottish Traditional music.

One day I’d like to practise up the fiddle, (my mum’s a violinist who also does Scottish Traditional music, so I’ve got a leaning) and combine with a guitarist to make a fusion duo of American Country and Western, Bluegrass and Scottish Traditional music. I don’t know what we’d call it, but it would be something sad.

Some words occurred to me that I thought would be a magnificent song/album title:

Text reads :”I’d trade ten bottles of whisky for a heart of gold”