At the weekend I brought a new sketchbook...a nice A4 one from a company whose name is the the outer layer of a rodent that dwells mainly underground. I don't usually work at A4 size. It's either A3 for figure drawing or notebook size for sketching.

Anyways, the sketchbook is specifically for location observation...something I've never really been that big a fan of and, frankly have never been that good at so I kind of avoid it. Buildings just don't really do it for me.

That said it was actually quite relaxing. Unlike people, I found that houses don't actually move...ever. It's possible to start something, go and get a beer, come back and it'll be in exactly the same place (this may not be true in San Fransisco) for you to carry on!

The opening three pages -

"Hidden Houses", CLIFTON DOWNS, BRISTOL

"This is the BBC", WHITELADIES ROAD, BRISTOL

"The Llandoger Trow", KINGS STREET, BRISTOL

The last picture is of a pub I drink at every now and again called, "The Llandoger Trow". It's in a dispute with "The Hatcher" over which one of them is the oldest still standing pub in Bristol. Both of them date to before c.1500...so they're probably both older than the European discovery of the America's. In the Trow they have barrel lids commemorating Admiral Lord Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) and it also happens to be the pub where Daniel DeFoe wrote "Robinson Crusoe" and Robert Louis Stevenson got the inspiration for the black spot in "Treasure Island"...little history lesson for you.

Life Drawing 13.05.10

(10 mins)

Recently our scanner has had trouble picking up drawings...this one seems to have suffered and lost the feet completely!

(2-3 Mins)

I didn't know how long the pose was and switched from one to the other rather late on (as I found out when they moved) and this is what one of my drawings looks like at about the 2-3 minute stage. It's kind of a weird mental thing I seem to have where this is not a sketch I would have done if someone had said, 'This is a 2 minute pose'. If some one had said that, I would've tried to thrash something out because 2 minutes doesn't sound like alot of time and I feel like I have to produce a 'full' drawing. In this one, with the same amount of time the whole pose is there with the shapes blocked out quite lightly on the page and as a whole it seems a bit more considered than a normal 2-3 minute drawing. Of course, then I go back into it and that's when I tend to mess things up...

(20 mins)

...which is what happend in these. We were in a different room for the session last night so the poses in the second half were longer than the norm and instead of drawing one pose for 10 minutes and then changing, for some reason I got it into my head I had to try and use the full time available (anyone else remember their teachers saying that phrase over and over about GCSE/A-Level time) and ended up over working these. I actually prefer the accidental 2 minute drawing to these. Let that be a lesson in learn where to stop.

Train wrecks (or warm ups and some people refer to them) and caricatures.

Until next week...

Life Drawing 06.05.10

Some stuff from the end of last term and the beginning of the new one -

Anyone for Badminton?

Last weekend saw the horse trials take place at Badminton, which is usually a 20 minute drive. During the horses trials this 20 minutes magically extends itself in to 2 hours as (so I'm told) more people show up for this than show up for Glastonbury.

For those not in the know, Badminton is a 3 day eventing competition, where the creme de la creme of the equestrian world turn up...one of whom I learned to ride with and two others who taught me how to ride way back. It's a great 3 days, the highlight being the cross-country around the grounds of Badminton house...and according to these sketches, just about everyone who turns up looks the same. Hat...check. Barbour Jacket (with plaid jacket underneath...and plaid jumper under that...and checked shirt under that)...check. Pink wellies....check!

I also made the discovery that 'drawing horses ain't easy'. I actually made that discovey a while ago, so I'm going to update that phrase to include '...at the best of times, and is downright impossible when thay have a person on their back and are charging around at who-knows-what speed and then jumping over things'

Sun is out

The sun is out in the UK. After one of the coldest winters for years we can sit outside and eat lunch again!

Road Trippin'

As some of you may have guessed from the last post, I've recently been on the continent and was one of the hundreds of thousands of stranded Brits. The ferry terminal was about the closest thing to being 'The Dunkirk evacuations: Part Deux' but with civilians instead of soldiers. Anyway...we ended up road tripping from Geneva to Calais and waiting it out for a ferry. Fun way to end a holiday, although rather expensive, and the 'effing insurance companies aren't paying out due to 'act of God'...which rather ironically, they told me on a Sunday, the Sabbath day...so what are they doing at work if they believe in God??Isn't that some kind of sin? Well I'm pretty sure they're going to hell anyway...

Some of our fellow travellers from around Europe...everyone kind of turned up at the ports and then stood around with no idea how to actually get across the channel. Lots of very tired, frustrated, bemused, anxious and betwixed people.

Les Alpes

This is a photo my bro took this morning as we stood on top of Europe. The guy on the far left in the yellow jacket...that's me!!

The law of sod...

I got stuck in a queue at the post office today. It took up my whole lunch break and more. I didn't even need to get the parcel paid for as it already had postage. I waited because the slot on the post box isn't big enough. When I reached the counter I looked at the woman across and said nothing. She understood.

Then the other six counters opened up.

Figure Drawing - 18.03

Figure drawing from the last 2 weeks...and the rest of the illustrator thing is on it's way...

Guide to using illustrator in-what-is-probably-a-very-long-roundabout-way-of-getting-the-result-you-want: Part One

I think last post I said I was teaching myself how to use Illustrator...I have to say is is a great tool and I'm figuring out a workflow which works for me. I think that's pretty important. I was browsing around the web for tutorials and saw loads of different methods to achieve different looks and by plowing through them you get to pick and choose which bits you use and develop your own...still haven't quite figured out the clipping masks and gradients yet though.

Anyways, I got a few things done with it but don't want to post them now...not because I'm embarassed by them or anything like that, but because they're for a specific project which I will hopefully reveal in the next couple of weeks (read:months).

So instead you'll have to be happy with a 'Guide to using illustrator in-what-is-probably-a-very-long-roundabout-way-of-getting-the-result-you-want'. It's also the way I would draw a panel for a comic book.

Step one: Draw something...anything -

It may sound obvious, but I don't just dive straight into illustrator and start clicking away. First, draw something. For example a train station. Personally I work both analog (is that how we refer to pencil and paper now?) and digitally. I have no real preference although the tactileness of paper is nice compared to a cintiq...which I would describe as drawing on silk. The up side to a cintiq is ctrl-z. For this one I did some thumbnails - the scene is Valentina Preti getting off a train. I only did 3 (to my shame) but I already had an idea in my head for what I wanted. It's an establishing shot but I also wanted Ms Preti getting odd the train, so thumb 2 was out because it was too wide, and I prefered thumb 1 to thumb 3. 1 has more depth to where as 3 is flatter an lower...which means that the camera for foreground characters is about crotch level...I don't like draing at crotch level. Anyway if they look like scribbles to you, who cares...they're personal reference and I know what each one is.

So after deciding on thumb one, I blow it up and go over it to get layout and put quick characters in, then go over that (this is one I'll take into illustrator) and also quickly put some tones on and apply blurs etc. This is about the time i would think about what size and shape the panel is on the page. I wouldn't call it a bad habit but I always tend to think of sequences in screen format. Can't for the life of me figure out why that would be. This is a bit different to designing for a comic page where you have to think about speech bubbles and text squares etc. It took me a long time to figure out panel layout and there aren't any hard and fast rules for it. Generally I do the following -
Comic book pages are usually drawn on 11" x 17" (or tabloid size if you look under the american paper sizes in photoshop) with a bleed set at 10" x 15" and a panel border at 9" x 13.5". The panel border is what the panels butt up against. You can put them in the gutter area but you risk it being cut off when the printer cuts the pages. I tend to split the page vertically and horizontally into whole, halfs, thirds, quarters and fifths and mix and match the panels to fit. So if we're looking at the diagram the first page (left) is split into third vertically. The top panel is a whole, the middle third is split half and the bottom panel is thirds. Same idea with the second page but fifths. The third page is a bit different - this is what I meant by mix and match. The whole page is split fifths with the to panel being 2/5 vertically and whole page width. The second panel is 2/5 vertically and half the page with panels 3 and 4 being half the with and only 1/5 vertical. and the botton panel spans the page and is 1/5 high. Thats generally how I go about setting out pages. It's not hard and fast but it works and you can always do elaborate panel layouts, like circle cut aways, if you want.

I think the panel is going to be about 1/4 tall and 3/4 wide giving me a small 1/4 by 1/4 square left over to put a close up in if this was an actual comic. And now I'm going to leave you hanging there as this is still underway...I actually have to do the illustrator bit before I can write about how I did the illustrator bit. I just have to remember to do screen grabs.

Oh look...

...it's more figure drawing.

Deco

So as well as attempting to learn After effects (tutorial still in progress) I figured why not try another member of that great Adobe family, Illustrator. After about an hour and a half of struggling with the pen tool I finally figured out how it works...I think. Well at least to a basic level. I can see why so many people swear by it. It's a very powerful tool and I'm only just scratching the surface. It has been added to 'the list' of things to get better at...a list which only ever seems to get longer!

JP

Vine. - Thoroughly entertaining. Fellow story bloke who sits under the stairs.

Life Drawing 15.10.09 - Silhouette

Tried a change of tact and decided to go marker pen and silhouette.