Cyril Blake

And today's second work is Cyril Blake, played by the late Stephen Lewis.  I think we all know where this collection is going now, yeah?

While it's immediately obvious who this is (for a change), the likeness isn't great.  But that's why I've named this one the way I have.  It's my take on Blakey, not a portrait of Stephen Lewis.  And, while my source photo was one showing the satisfaction of schadenfreude, this has come out with an expression of terror, which I guess fits in just as well with the theme.

I made a mistake early on, using black around the edges of the mouth (did a I tell you I like to do darks first with markers?  Well I do).  It made the mouth stand out too much and meant I had to use much more black than I was intending in the rest of the drawing.  Still, I think it came out just about OK.  The cap is really good.  Skin tones are interesting and include green, blue, pink and violet as well as greys and normal skin tones. The pink sky at the end seemed like the best colour or contrast with t(e blues of the buildings and the greys of the uniform - I think that worked well.

In the end, it's OK, nothing special.  But, as usual, I'm saving final judgement until I see all six together.

Arthur Rudge

I almost made it through the whole of December without doing any artwork, which was a bit worrying.  I thought I'd better get back to it before the rot set in.  I thought I'd kick off with some marker portraits after reading that Jake Spicer book.  I even challenged myself by deliberately choosing a pose with the head tilted back.

This is, of course, Arthur Rudge ("You STUPID great lump!") played by the late Michael Robbins.  He lived in Hitchin for a good few years, making him a local hero for me (I was born in Hitchin and only moved out of the area when I was just short of 23).  He's the first of a collection of six, in case you hadn't guessed.

I think the likeness is reasonable today but better if you know who it is.  The telephone has been merged into the shadow on the left.  While the shape of the phone isn't great, this does give me the opportunity to tinker with the face shape by extending the black shadow shape in places - this is starting to become my favourite trick.

Anyway, that's Arthur.  More to come.

Draw Faces In 15 Minutes: Jake Spicer - Book Review

In that last post, I talked about all the new art gear that I opened up on Christmas morning.  Great stuff but there were no art instruction books in there and my Amazon wishlist was feeling a little bit bloated with books, so I thought I'd ease the pressure and buy myself one.  I picked this one out for two reasons: (i) the ridiculously low price, and (ii) it being a book on portraits, so more in line with my winter work than my summer work.  It's a 128 page paperback.  Smaller than a normal art book but big enough.

I had a slightly bad feeling when buying this one that it might be a bit lightweight, like the urban sketching handbook series.  Thin on pages and thin on ideas, doing little more than regurgitating all the tips that all similar books have in common and having nothing extra to add on top of that.  I was wrong.

After giving us all the usual stuff about materials and how to draw, the book starts getting interesting.  Jake's has a numbered step approach to portraiture that starts off quite blurry before adding detail and them more detail on top of that.  I liked how some of the steps in the process were about rubbing out most of what was already down on the paper, leaving faint lines as indications of where to go over in more detail.  That struck a chord with me.  I've not seen other authors talking about rubbing out and adding improvements.

Another thing I liked was the structuring of the book.  Rather than just go through portraiture in one big long chapter, Jake gave us a chapter on how to do a basic portrait.  Then another chapter on improvements that could be made to this process.  Then another chapter on extra things like getting a likeness and on how age and gender make faces different.  This is the best way to learn.  You need to walk around the mountain before you climb it.

The book's aimed at people using graphite pencils or maybe charcoal but, because there wasn't much in there about graduated shading, pretty well everything also applied to markers and inktense pencils, which suits me.

The book feels like it fills a hole.  Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and Keys To Drawing are a great introduction to drawing and The Big Book Of Great Drawing Secrets went into lots of detail on realism but there's room for something in between.  That's the hole that Jake has filled.  Two other areas I look out for in books are whether the art within them is an inspiration and how easy they are to read.  The artwork in this one isn't what I'd call inspirational - it's there to instruct rather than to amaze, which still makes it worthwhile.  And for ease of reading, yeah, Jake easily clears the bar on that one.

Overall, I was expecting to give this one no more than three palettes.  After all, it's small and thin with silly handwriting and a cartoony face on the cover.  It doesn't look like a serious art book.  Just something that somebody threw together for a laugh.  But it's not.  There are plenty of ideas in there, often giving concrete examples of things you could spot if you just sat and observed.  And from what I've seen, it does fill a hole in the library of art instruction books.  Let's go for four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨

Christmas Stash

As life slowly reverts back to (the new) normal, it's time for me to show off what new art gear I got for Christmas.

First up is a Meeden watercolour easel.  It's really lightweight, with all the metal parts folding down into something tiny in a bag that would never lose you a game of Buckaroo.  There are two big white bits that don't fold down but can be carried around in a bag with all the rest of my gear - they're not that much bigger than the watercolour blocks that I paint on.  Anyway, on to features.  The white panel at the top can be put to any angle, including horizontal, so is definitely good for watercolour.  And then there's the other white bit that could be used as a palette but which I'll be using as a shelf for my palette, brushes, water, etc.  I definitely need a shelf there.  When the sun's out again, I'll be doing lots of plein air painting around the village rather than just working from photos at home.  And if I make it to Landscape Artist Of The Year as a wildcard again, I'll fit in a bit better - last time I was one of only two that turned up without easels.

Next up are three granulating primatek Daniel Smith watercolours, Mayan blue genuine, hematite violet genuine and green apatite genuine.  I had my eye on these after watching a couple of Jean Lurssen videos and, indeed, those three swatches come from her videos, the first two here and the third one here.  The granulating quality of these paints is amazing, as is the way that the green and purple seem to separate into separate component colours as they dry.  I'm really looking forward to trying these out.

And finally, I now have an 18-colour Mijello palette - the blue one rather than the fuchsia.  I'll  waiting until the sun comes out before I fill it with colours so have time to think about what will go in there.  There's room for my existing squad of twelve colours.  The extra six will probably be my three regular opaques (cadmium red, cadmium yellow and sepia) and the three new Daniel Smith colours.  That leaves no room for Payne's grey (a colour that I used to use for skies but have gone off in recent years as I've moved on to using the same three colours in the sky as in most of the rest of the painting) or titanium white (which would probably get contaminated in the palette).  The tough choice will be over how to arrange the colours in the palette: whether to leave the Daniel Smiths occupying three guest slots on the end or whether to treat them as official squad members and housed alongside similar colours.  I’ll have to think about that one.  Maybe I'll decide after giving the Daniel Smiths a go.

A cracking stash, you must admit.

My Feet

And here's the last of the Bert Dodson exercise drawings that I'll be sharing.  I think all he asked us to do was to make ourselves comfortable and draw our feet.  So that's what I did.  I think this one came out pretty well.

Paul

Another exercise from the Bert Dodson book.  I was tasked with drawing a portrait of someone with a head pointed downwards so that the face was a bit flattened.

I found this photo of Paul.  A guy who was at Christ's at same time as me but that I didn't have many dealings with.  I spotted his Facebook avatar when he was commenting on a friend's post and immediately thought of the Dodson exercise that was on my to do list.

As with so many people that I didn’t mix with in college days, Paul's one of those people that actually feels like an old friend when we go to the same reunions.  A good guy.

My Eyes

It's been a couple of years since I first read Keys To Drawing by Bert Dodson.  My original plan was to attempt every single exercise in the book and to post the results here as one big combined medley of drawings.  At some point though (probably when Bert started telling me to do five drawings all on the same theme) this plan fell by the wayside.  I was left with a bunch of pencil drawings that haven't seen the light of day since.  And as it's been a while since my last work, I thought I'd post up the best of the drawings here.

First up is this one.  Bert asked us to draw our own eyes.  This is OK but I've done better since in my latest self portrait and a couple of oil pastel drawings of my separate eyes.