Drink!!!

Elaine's Gin Label

Elaine makes lovely fruit gins that she shares with people in little Kilner bottles. I've made a label for her. It is a little abstract watercolour (intending to evoke soft fruit bushes and trees) that we print on address labels from Microsoft Word. I added the border using Paint 3D - which was a right faff.

Five a Day

From Doodle to Birthday Card

Happy Birthday Elaine

Elaine liked the Gone Fishing doodle I included in the post on Silhouetting, so I made it into a Birthday card for her. I know, it’s not a romantic image, but the card was made with love.

Creating it was relatively simple, I:

• Wrote Happy Birthday on rice paper using a brush pen.
• Used GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program - a free alternative to Photoshop) to colour and combine the images. 
• Uploaded the resulting image onto a Moonpig card. 

This isn’t a cost-effective way of creating cards to sell, but it worked well as a one off. One thing I would do differently next time is to save the images in a higher resolution. I would also consider combining the image and text in a desktop publishing package rather than an image manipulation package.

Happy Birthday Elaine

Expressive Drawing - Repetition

Repetition of a Motif
Expressive Drawing - Chapter 6 - Play 1
Mixed Media on Paper
59.4cm x 84.1cm (23.4" x 33.1")

Chapter 6 of Expressive Drawing by Steven Aimone is about Repetition. Steven defines repetition as the recurring appearance or presence of a visual element such as a line, mark, shape, texture, tone, colour, directionality, etc. He argues that drawings that feature repletion naturally hold together.

Repetition of a Motif
Expressive Drawing - Chapter 6 - Play 1
Charcoal and Graphite on Paper
59.4cm x 84.1cm (23.4" x 33.1")

Repetition is one of the five principles of composition identified by Arthur Wesley Dow in his work on Composition (see Repetition).

Repetition of Multiple Motifs
Expressive Drawing - Chapter 6 - Build 1
Charcoal and Graphite on Paper
59.4cm x 84.1cm (23.4" x 33.1")

The Play and Build exercises in this chapter involve creating drawings with one or more repeating motifs. The exercises employ the approach common to most exercises in the early part of the book: draw, observe, absorb, repeat, (undoing, covering up or veiling as necessary).

Repetition of a Motif
Expressive Drawing - Chapter 6 - Play 1
Mixed Media on Paper
28cm x 38cm (11" x 15")

I haven’t been doing much painting recently, and it’s years since I’ve painted in acrylics. As an experiment I painted over some of the drawings from these exercises.

Shape Motif Repetition
Expressive Drawing - Chapter 6 - Build 2
Charcoal on Paper
59.4cm x 84.1cm (23.4" x 33.1")

Work has been really busy recently, but I am beginning to get back into the habit of (and enjoying) more regular drawing and painting.

Keys to Drawing with Imagination – Shading

Coastal Path Trees - Six Years Ago
Shading
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
21cm x 29.7cm (8.3" x 11.7")

Exercise 5 from Keys to Drawing with Imagination by Bert Dodson is about shading. The instructions are to copy or trace some doodles from the Building Blocks exercise (see Keys to Drawing with Imagination – Building Blocks), then to add light, shade and cast shadows. I started from scratch because my doodles from the previous exercise didn't seem very suitable.

Interestine
Shading
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
21cm x 29.7cm (8.3" x 11.7")

I’ve never been a great fan of crosshatching, so I used this opportunity to embrace it by trying to emulate some artists whose crosshatching I enjoy. In the drawing at the top of the post, I tried to channel the style of Ian Sidaway (Ian Sidaway Fine Line and Ian Sidaway Studio). These trees have appeared before when I painted them from the same photo 6 years ago (see Fast and Loose).

Tommy Kane's Lemon
Shading
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
29.7cm x 21cm (11.7" x 8.3")

The sketch of the lemon is based on a video by Tommy Kane - Tommy Kane on How to KrossHatch. While I was drawing it, I realised I’m not getting on with my new fountain pen as well as I would like -  Elaine gave it to me last Christmas. My old pen happily glides across the paper applying ink evenly, but this new one is scratchy and doesn't deliver the ink smoothly. This might be because of the different ink I use in it, but I think it is because the nib is not properly worn in. I’m trying to remedy this by pressing down too hard when I use it - which will hopefully speed up the wearing in process.

Keys to Drawing with Imagination – Silhouetting

Kiss Me Quick
Silhouetting
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
21cm x 29.7cm (8.3" x 11.7")

Exercise four in Keys to Drawing with Imagination by Bert Dodson is another 2 parter. Both assignments start by drawing a cluster of shapes. In the first exercise you keep a uniform(ish) distance between the shapes and fill them in with black. In the second exercise you make all the shapes touch in at least one place and then fill in around them.

Gone Fishing
Silhouetting
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
21cm x 29.7cm (8.3" x 11.7")

Both designs remind me of souvenir tea towels from seaside towns.

Keys to Drawing with Imagination – Building Blocks

Alas
Building Blocks
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper

The third exercise in Keys to Drawing with Imagination by Bert Dodson is about Building Blocks. The first assignment is to create doodles using marker dots, stubble (short dashes) and stipple (dots). The second is to draw improbable structures made of bricks, stones or blocks.

Eiffel Tower
Building Blocks
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper

I wasn’t enthusiastic about my drawings, but they led to a deeper understanding that doodling can mean different things at different times. Sometimes it’s a diversion, sometimes it’s focused more on experimentation than results, and sometimes the same techniques can be used in a more controlled way to refine a doodle into art.

L'Elephant
Building Blocks
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper

Peter Draws creates excellent doodle art and has an entertaining on-line presence. Shortly after finishing these exercises I watched one of his videos - Dots for Days ... Intricate Stippling Art - which includes the advice:

Don’t do stippling if you are in a hurry. Place each dot as its own little dot, intentionally, slowly. It’s its own thing. Its own little drawing.

Since this revelation I’ve been creating much more satisfying doodles. I’ve a bit of a backlog to post over the next few weeks. Work continues to eat into my art time and this blog is suffering as a result.

Keys to Drawing with Imagination – Doodling Algorithms

Atomium
Doodling Algorithms
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
21cm x 29.7cm (8.3" x 11.7")

In Keys to Drawing with Imagination, Bert Dodson introduces the idea of Doodling Algorithms – take a simple rule or motif and repeat it multiple times with slight variations to fill a page.

Bert presents different types of doodle: geometrical patterns, waves, tangles and shape clusters. The second exercise in the book is to pick one of the categories (I chose tangle) and draw a series of doodles using the algorithm.

Pipework
Doodling Algorithms
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
21cm x 29.7cm (8.3" x 11.7")

Most of my tangles came out looking like puzzles – Find your way through the maze. How many loops? Which shot was fired first?

Who Shot First?
Doodling Algorithms
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
21cm x 29.7cm (8.3" x 11.7")

The Atomium doodle is based on a doodle I used to draw during maths lessons - to aid my concentration, obviously.

Paper Loop?
Doodling Algorithms
Keys to Drawing with Imagination
Ink on Paper
21cm x 29.7cm (8.3" x 11.7")

I'm enjoying working through Bert’s book. Currently, I don’t have much time for drawing and painting, but it is pretty easy to find time for a bit of doodling and it is helping to improve my hand control and sense for composition/design.