I suck at drawing.

I got new glasses!

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:42:00 +0000

They are bigger and cooler than my old ones, and make me look like

1) A public radio presenter

2) A professor of French studies

3) A minor beat poet

4) Morrissey

Feel

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:16:25 +0000

You know what? I’m pretty happy with this one.

It’s another one I copied out of an art book. It’s the Virgin Annunciate by Antonello da Messina. (Here’s the actual painting.)

Hey sure, it’s got some problems. I think the biggest thing is that her hands kind of get lost in the lines of her mantle. I need to find a way to make things stand out from busy areas more.

But it’s got things that went right too! For perhaps the first time in my drawings:

her face looks human, not undead.
her mantle looks 3D! It’s got texture and folds.
her bookstand thing has different texture. It looks hard, while other stuff looks soft.

Overall, it’s just - this drawing has a feel to it. And as a beginner, I’m happy with that as a place to be right now. I can stand up and truthfully declare ‘I produce things with occasional feel’.

Jessica Fletcher

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:34:48 +0000

A friend of mine who draws amazing comics declared all this week Jessica Fletcher Week. He published a new comic starring the sleuth herself every day, and asked some other people to do bonus drawings of Jessica for his blog. I was one of them!

Here’s my Fletcher. Criminals, you don’t want to see this face lurking for you in the shadows. A sip from a teacup will be the last sound you hear before justice makes you its bitch.

A German bike

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:43:11 +0000

…locked to a German lamppost. In Germany.

It was raining a bit as I was drawing, so there are a couple of places where the ink has run, which I quite like. Instant watercolours!

The stuff you don't see

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:53:46 +0000

A while ago I decided that I wasn’t going to publish all my daily drawings. Partially that was because I knew I was going away, and I didn’t want to publish a month’s worth of, well, very everyday drawings when I got back.

It was also because I wanted to give myself a chance to do stuff knowing that I wouldn’t have to show it to anybody. I could draw more from my imagination that way, and if something turned out really badly, no one would have to know.

It’s been freeing, but that’s had its good and its bad points. On the one hand, my daily drawings from this last month have definitely been more about playing around with whatever’s in my head at the time. Which I like. As it turns out, I draw more naked people if I don’t have to show anyone.

And then there are the weird pages that never would have happened if I’d been drawing only the objects around me. Like this one, featuring my knee, a neuron, and some kind of screaming robot. Um.

On the other hand, publishing every day kept me more honest. There are more days than I’d like from the last little while where it’s all just a bit half-assed. Too often, drawing is the last thing I do just before bed, and you can tell all I want to do is shut off the light as quickly as possible.

So: a bit of bootstrap-pulling necessary now. Taking more time, publishing more, and probably less drawing just before bed.

Found in Manchester

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:10:02 +0000

This pound coin.

CHAT 2 ROYAL MINT FITTIES IN YR AREA

I went away

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:49:51 +0000

For a couple of work things. They involved being away from my scanner, and this blog, for a while. Sorry.

They also involved driving, which I really enjoy and rarely get to do. Going fast, singing along to the radio, having the road to yourself late at night: all fantastic.

The reality of a road trip is sometimes less glamourous, though. Sometimes you find yourself in a service station on the M6, gazing out the window at a heavy sky and doodling the sign for a parking meter.

On the front of a Wimpy bag.

Faces are hard: the first in a probably infinite series

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:24:00 +0100

This week I read John Singer Sargent’s quote that “a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth”. This made me feel better about how the faces I draw very rarely come out looking the way I originally wanted them to. All of my drawings have wonky parts, but it’s only faces that can be completely changed by a couple of stray lines.

One of my drawings this week was of a figurine I found pictured in an art book. It’s of Kuya, a 10th century Japanese priest. His teachings centred around a particular chanted phrase that he believed was the key to salvation, so the figure is of him chanting this phrase. The thing that caught me about it (small version here) was how the expression on Kuya’s face had this mixture of tension and calm. There’s clearly an effort to say the phrase, but also a sense of surrender and peace. After drawing it, I had a new respect for how difficult it must have been to convey such subtlety in the figure, as my version makes him look like an undead mummy soldier.

But the face problem had actually come up earlier in the week, in a much more cartoony drawing. Because of a train cancellation, I had to take a route between Reading and London that involved, instead of no stops, seventeen. I decided that I would draw how my face looked when we got to each station. Again, just a line out of place would change my expression from boredom to anger, confusion, or in the case of the Wokingham face, barfing.

I guess it’s going to take some practice to be able to get a better control over what happens in the faces I draw. Although if Sargent never got to the point where he was doing faces right, I’d also better get used to the idea that there will always be some surprises. Compromise goal: fewer surprise puking expressions!

I liked the pattern in a picture of Pee Wee King’s...

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:53:51 +0100

I liked the pattern in a picture of Pee Wee King’s accordian, so I drew a pattern based on it.

A lot of the things I drew last week were more doodly than normal. I was pretty busy all week (hence the lack of posts) so my drawings tended to be quick, and sometimes rushed. The reason I ended up taking liberties with Pee Wee’s accordian was because I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, and kept making mistakes in the copying. I finally thought I may as well just doodle a pattern if I wasn’t going to take care to copy the original. It was good to have the feeling of making something up as I went along, but I bet even that’s better when you let it take more time.

Feeling things. Things like my face

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:59:00 +0100

Today I did something pretty different: I did a few drawings that weren’t supposed to look like anything. A few weeks ago the Guardian published a guide to drawing, and I got my hands on a copy. The first few exercises in the guide are about feeling what you’re drawing. Drawing as a way of recording the act of looking, is I think how they put it.

So there was a picture I drew by closing my eyes and feeling my face with my hand…

…and a shoe drawn with my wrong hand and without looking.

It was interesting to draw stuff where the point wasn’t for it to look like the thing itself. I found it tough to let go of that, a bit – when I first looked at the results I didn’t know what to think. Was it all right? For some reason, especially the face one, I almost expected mystical inner truth to be revealed. Instead there are some squiggles.

One thing that was nice, and this is probably more the point, was enjoying the feeling of seeing, and translating that through movement. My grip was more relaxed, I stopped feeling the time go by, and everything was smoother.

I’ll go back and do more of these, not only because they’re a good exercise but because they’re enjoyable. I’m glad I’ve come to it after doing some drawings with realism as the goal, though. It’s nice to get a bit of the gratification of doing drawings that look like stuff in the beginning. Now I can appreciate a bit of relaxing and feeling the process of seeing something, whereas if I’d started with this I’d probably be all ‘GRR SHOES MUST LOOK LIKE SHOES’.

The biological forms of household objects (OK, duck curtains)

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:59:58 +0100

On Friday I made an important discovery. Cows, of the type you see in English pastoral paintings, are bath-shaped.

See? Totally bath-shaped, just with hooves instead of clawfeet. I came upon this anatomical curiosity when I was doing some doodling and managed to produce two future design classics: the bull bath and duck curtains.

On an innovation roll, I then drew one of my belts as a snake.

One of the things that made the beltsnake a bit tough to draw was having to connect up the overlapping loops. You have to leave one for a while, go away and draw the bit on the other side, and hope that when it’s done it all looks like a continuous strip of leather. It all worked out fine there, but I found the same going-away-and-coming-back thing harder on Saturday’s drawing.

This is the top of my folded umbrella. I liked it for its blossomy-ness and decided to try drawing it. Because of all the loops of fabric, I had the same challenge as the belt – drawing interconnecting bits at different points in the process and have it look like like a coherant whole. It’s not that successful, but I think it gets better the further out from the centre you get. The left and the top manage to get a bit of texture. I have to admit, though, that there are a bunch of little curls around the core bit of plastic that I’ve totally missed out here. Oops. Have a look at the top of an umbrella sometime though. It’s pretty cool.

The sign outside Fran’s on College Street in Toronto....

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:18:02 +0100

The sign outside Fran’s on College Street in Toronto. It’s a brilliant diner. If you’re in Toronto you should go there and get breakfast. Now! It’s open 24 hours. Glenn Gould used to go there every day, but of course you knew that.

A friend and I went to Fran’s when we were in Toronto, so this one’s for him.

Ain't no cure for love

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:23:00 +0100

A friend of mine overheard a girl in Soho the other day saying into her phone, ‘That’s what men do. They fuck you over then sit in the living room listening to Leonard Cohen, slitting their wrists. That’s what they do.’

Clearly this girl has somehow got hold of my secret method for dating. Basically, if you end up spending a Saturday evening looking like this:

you know you’re doing it right.

A sim card, another in the series of drawing small things...

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:19:00 +0100

A sim card, another in the series of drawing small things unnervingly large.

I want this to be cleaner. I think the thing I really liked about the sim card was the sense of everything being a little delicate and just so. Like the circuit in the chip. Or the shape of the space that wraps around the sim, like little brackets. And I think you lose that sense with the wonky lines. So yeah, will probably start obsessing now about how everything must be straaaaaaight.

Arty hard

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:39:07 +0100

Last week a friend told me about Know Your Meme, and since then I’ve spent a truly brain-damaging amount of time giggling at crass, heartless, random in-jokes. God I love the internet.

Anyway, I decided to do a drawing in honour of one of my favourites.

Look at Van Gogh there, with his ear all bandaged up, just having a smoke like a badass. Dude knows how to party.

This drawing is best enjoyed whilst listening to this:

Les frocks du mal

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:27:48 +0100

From the fashion collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I promise you that in real life, these are all really elegant. Somehow, when I got finished with them, they had aquired a much more sinister air. Shading problems had turned the middle two into rags and a shroud respectively, and I assure fans of Yves St-Laurent that in the display cabinet, the one on the far right looked much less like an evil robot. The one on the left, the Thierry Mugler, actually came out looking pretty accurate. Unfortunately, in the company of the others, ‘graceful sophisticate’ slips so easily into ‘cruel henchwoman’.

Elsewhere in the gallery they were exhibiting some designs by Royal College of Art students. This one, by Liam Jackson, I liked a lot. According to the label he’s combining cycle courier and the illustrations for Oliver Twist by George Cruikshank. And you know, I’m perfectly all right with that.

Drawing-wise I was happier with this one. The only thing is that in my haste to get on with drawing it, I estimated the proportions wrong and ended up running off the page at the shoulders. But then, the mannequin didn’t have a head anyway, so no harm no foul.

One more thing: this was my first foray into drawing stuff in a museum. I was pretty self-conscious, as though one of the families of French tourists might be looking over my shoulder at any moment, deciding that I wasn’t good enough to be one of those people who draws in museums. Which, of course, is all in my head. All you need is one of those nerdy folding stools they hand out and instantly you are one of those people who draws in museums. I’m sure it’s one of those things where, once you do it a few times, the self-consciousness goes away. Or the Art Cops turn up, one or the other.

False starts

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:41:09 +0100

Last night I dashed up to my room (in between dinner and X Factor – oh god yes, I admit it) to do a drawing. I discovered one of the cats on my bed sleeping, thought ‘aw, that’ll be nice’ and trained my laser-like drawing eyes on him. Except he just WOULDN’T SIT STILL, and so after three attempts…

…each aborted when he got up to rearrange himself and laid back down with his head conveniently turned 45 degrees from the way it had been, I gave up. Instead I drew the seed matchbook I got at a restaurant this week. Then I watched some trashy TV with the flatmates. Saturday evening, and I was a beaten man.

After mentally sizing down a taxi earlier this week, I thought...

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:39:12 +0100

After mentally sizing down a taxi earlier this week, I thought I’d try and size something up. So I drew my contact lens case on a full sheet of A4.

The results, I think you’ll agree, are slightly terrifying.

Pulling power

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:06:54 +0100

You know those scenes in movies where a single guy is taking care of someone else’s baby, and when he wanders through a park it’s like he’s wearing a sign that says ‘I am hot. Please come on to me now’? This evening I discovered the Covent Garden equivalent of that.

I was getting a coffee while waiting for a friend, and doing today’s drawing. As soon as I got the notebook out, I was getting all the looks from all the boys. It was as though they saw a guy perched at a café, sketching away, and suddenly he was a tender arty romance waiting to happen. Perhaps in that second it took for that lingering look, soft-focus fantasies were running through their heads involving smooching and too much wine, and the phrase ‘I have to draw you’.

When really what I would actually say would be closer to ‘shush, I have to draw a scribbly picture of the place I’m about to go buy comics from’.

London transport

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:46:12 +0100

I think this is the first drawing I’ve done where I’ve actually had to think about proportions beforehand. Mostly I’ve drawn things to the same dimensions they occupy in my field of vision, so I just copy what I see onto the page. With this one, though, I knew I wanted both the tree and the taxi on my little notebook page, so I had to think about squeezing them both on. There was a lot of comparing the size and placement of one thing to another – ‘OK, the left side of the door is directly under the right side of the taxi light…there.’

I’m sort of surprised it’s my first go at that. How have I gone three weeks without changing the sizes of anything? The taxi is a bit stretched in the length – I kind of want to plump it up from the sides, like a pillow – but otherwise I think the proportions are OK. I remember from drawing it, though, that it was really difficult to keep everything in the drawing where it was in reality. Put a tyre in the wrong place and suddenly it throws off the windows.

This is a sign in Bank station. The most fun about this one was trying to get all the different shades when colouring the tiles. Actually no, it’s a three-way tie between that, reproducing Gill Sans in handwriting and the fact that someone went to the trouble of putting stylised feathers on the arrow. Thank you, designers of the past.