This is what three weeks looks like

Two weeks on and I’m still lacking much motivation. Things are getting up to speed though, shortly my daughter will be going back to school signifying the end of the summer and the routine will dramatically change again and in work, all our customers have returned from their holidays and have started dumping crap on us again. And it’s taken me two weeks to just sit down to write this post. Shouldn’t really take that much, but energy and focus have been lacking. I guess the dull weather since getting home has putting on a drain, especially when we had such lovely weather on holidays.

(More pics and drawings after the break)

He was so tired, he just fell asleep outside

When I was on holidays, despite only get one true sleep-in (as in I wasn’t woken by the kids at 7am, my wife and myself took turns getting up to take care of the weeks) and despite the weather not being gorgeous all the time, I was rather productive. I wrote three new short stories. They are currently sitting on my laptop awaiting editing, but it was fun to just write and they are rather short. I will eventually get them up online, if you care to read them. I also spent a huge amount of time working on my Lost Heroes RPG: Book of the Gods. In total I wrote 27,288 words (is that a lot?), all for my own pleasure. I’m still chugging away at Book of the Gods, but my rate of progress has severely slowed (writing this post means I’m not working on it). But it’s moving forward at least.

The weather before we left: foggy, cold and raining!

The holiday was great in general. It was nice weather most of the time, expect for one memorable storm that started suddenly with thunder and lightning in the middle of the day. Then hailstones the size of large marbles and ten minutes later, it’s over.  An hour later, the sun has dried everything.

There was some family crisis, my poor wife hurt her back and shes still have some serious problems with it now, over two weeks later. It’s slowly getting better, but I won’t get into it. Besides that it was just good to get away.

The weather in France

I also got to do some drawing and painting, some of it came out quite nice, but I certainly didn’t produce as much output as I have done in previous years. One of the quirks of the place we go is that there is no television, no Internet connection and we don’t even bother to turn on the radio. It’s absolute great to disconnect. I did try to “tweet” a little while away but it seems I forgot that a text message is longer than 140 so I ended up with loads of messages that cut out right in the middle! Anyway, I left behind any of the work I did create so I all I have of the stuff I did are these photos:

I’m not too fond of the watercolour though. I never finished it, becoming frustrated by the mixing of the colours (I couldn’t produce enough consistent colours). I didn’t get the chance to do another though. The great thing though about where we go is that its full of inspiring things! Books and posters from the Napoleon era, this antique box of gaming stuff, these old boilers in every room or this great big tower at the front of the house:

But holidays can’t last forever I guess. And now I’m back in the real world. Go me!

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So over the holiday I got to some drawing. The big thing really was that I started to use charcoal, not a major step but something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. But I started with a simple tonal study, to get my eye and hands back into the swing of it (for some reason WordPress has cropped the thumbnail so to have a proper look at it, click on it):

So my first effort with charcoal was this (click on it to see the bigger version):

It was done as quick experiment on my sketchbook (across two pages) of a twig. I did the outline in ink. However you can see where the charcoal smudged accidentally. I liked it, it was much easier and faster to pull out the change in tones using the charcoal than with pencil like in the tonal study I did first. But a lot messier and prone to accidents.

I then went out and found something to really try the charcoal out on. In Chargey, where we were on holidays, there is lots of really old lovely things. There was this “saint” statue on the side of the old house, worn by weather, it had long lost its head. I love the fact that it was just a lump of rock but somehow you were able to perceive that it was once a detailed statue (again WordPress has cropped the thumbnail, I’ll have to find a fix for that):

The first one was done with pencil and charcoal. I didn’t do any of the background which I think distracts from the picture, loses it’s context, but I also found the final work messy and, well, a bit random. The second study, I outlined in ink first, including the background and then tried to capture the tone of the stone statue with charcoal. I think the second one is better but loses the feel of the statue. Everyone who saw the actual drawings preferred the first one, because the contrast between ink and charcoal was much more noticeable than the digital copies here.

There was a second statue, much bigger than this one but also very similar. This time I tried toned paper (i.e. not white):

The first thing that hit was the effect of the grade of paper. My light pencil marks were not working, so I dove straight in with the charcoal but I couldn’t make any tone… just black and a tiny smudge. The effort was a bit, well shite. If you knew the statue in the house, you’d recognise it, but I think it failed to capture anything else.

What this highlighted for me was the effect of the type of paper on my drawing, in particular with charcoal. On my notebook (the twig) I was able to get a really good strength and contrast of tone, but on my A4 sketch pad, the paper is thinner. It has a different effect, harder to generate really deep tones. But the coloured paper was the thickest of them all but it’s texture made it impossible to create contrast in tones at all. I’ve always known that paper makes a difference, but it was always negligible for me. With ink, I would place a spare page underneath thin paper so it’d soak up ink that leaked through. Also the way my coloured  markers’ ink spread, was really affected by the thickness of the paper.

So my first thoughts on charcoal is that it’s cool. I like what I can produce with it, but it does require further playing with it. And I love its messiness.

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After doing drawing exercises on texture, I felt inspired to draw, just for drawing. My daughter and her cousin both have a “Kaloo”, a brand teddy bear that has a long hat that can be used for sucking. Alice has two since she was a baby. She had three but lost one. Her cousin had three or four. So while they were preoccupied I grabbed one of each of their kaloos, a car for the cousin, Antoine (he’s mad into cars) and a flower that Alice picked when we went for a walk. I thought it was a nice, simple composition, and it came out very well.

(More drawings after the jump…)

I went looking for something else to draw the next day and I remembered this cute little statue of Cherub Angel, that was tucked away on a book shelf. I like the final result. While not a perfect rendering, it captured something of the rough detail of the statue.

This picture is actually done from a photograph. It’s based on my daughter Alice and there is no way she would have sat for the 2-3 hours it took to do the drawing. Actually, I only know it’s 2-3 hours because my wife informed me when I had finished. I felt I had only spent 30 minutes or so. The photograph was one of opportunity. Alice and Antoine ran in from a walk with the grandparents. They had wreaths of leaves on their head. There was something-oh-so- fey about it and the photo captured it. I think I captured something of that too while it’s certainly not a close rendering of Alice.

Of course, I shouldn’t have said it was based on Alice, because that was the feedback I got… “I can kinda see Alice in it…”. Which kind of made it impossible to do the next drawing. I wanted to do second drawing, this time using Antoine’s photo. However I got wrapped up in trying to get a good rendering of him. After nearly two and half hours, I was no closer. I had restarted five times, trying to get his face right. In the end, I had to stop because I was getting frustrated with the process and thats bad. I had to remind myself that it’s the act of drawing that’s enjoyable and if I didn’t get his look right, it wasn’t the end of the world. However, later I went back to the rough sketch and used pens to give it a quick outline. I didn’t want to make the effort wasted.

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There is simply something cool about having a hobby that requires you to use tools and to take care of those tools. I know roleplaying has ten-side dice and big fancy cool books, but it’s just not the same. I understand now how fishing can be enjoyable without actually catching anything. I found myself getting all “geeked-out” while lining up my drawing pencils and sharpening them just right; the point has to be sharp, but a long bit of the lead has to be exposed too. (Pictures and more after the jump) .

Before my holidays, I had decided to go back to basics with my drawing. I had let my basic drawing skills languish over the years. So I got myself a rather excellent book on drawing:
“The Complete Guide to Drawing and Illustration”. It’s a well thought out course, designed to get you drawing full pictures straight away and build up a strong process. Drawing is simply a skill. Art is in the expression and the composition. Everyone can draw so I bugs me a little when someone says “I wish I could draw”, because they can, they’ve just decided they can’t. I shouldn’t get so irate about it though as it’s this exact mentality that made me consider my drawing as a secondary way to creatively express myself (writing became my first). In school there were a number of very talented artists, who were simply better. As I went through school, I ended up comparing my results to their work and found it lacking. Rather than try and improve and ask for help, I did the teenager thing and sulk about it and since then I’ve let my love of drawing dwindle.

The introductory text reminded me of exactly why I like drawing. My wife says that I’m a man of simple pleasures, it’s not what you draw or the end image that is important but it’s the act of drawing that gives you pleasure and capturing “something” in the end result, an expression, a tone or a strange shape. Drawing, in itself, is not complex but is engaging.

So with this long holiday planned, I decided to pack my drawing stuff. I was excited about picking up my pencils and pens again. Chargey is in the east of France, lost in the country side and properly soaked in the summer sun. The house is old, several generations, filled with old paintings and antiques going back to Napoleon times. A great place for finding subjects to draw.

I do have one complaint about the book, but it is minor. All the examples are done by the author, Peter Gray and he’s a professional. His images are wonderful. I’d love to see work done by some example “students”, just to compare with my own. Or maybe that’s a bad thing. Anyway, the first exercise was a mug. A simple exercise in lines and circles. It was fun and simple to do. An interesting side note is that, no where in the book does he suggest using rulers and compasses to get exact shapes, just guidelines and freehand.

[singlepic id="80" w="320" h="200" mode="" float="right" ]The next exercise then was some basic shapes, rectangles, cylinders, etc. Most drawing books try and get you to draw a cylinder from one hundred and fifty different angles. Following, logically, on from that was organic shapes, such as fruits. It was at this point he introduce “composition”. I never worried about composition before. It is always one of those “advanced” topics in other books. They’d expect you to able to draw whole bodies perfectly before worrying about composition, but Peter makes a good point: a badly drawing picture can still work if the composition is good. It’s something I never considered before, but he’s right. The way objects are laid out and from where you view them is just as important as how well you depict the shapes on the page. If the composition is wrong, the whole picture is wrong before you begin. Shape and composition is actually enough to start doing full drawings but there is two more components missing. One is shadow and tone, the other is…

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