All my life I have admired people who can make marks on paper that capture your imagination in some way. That has widened to include other forms of design, like furniture, pottery, sculpture, fabric design, even knitting. I’ve never stopped trying to do that.
All these activities mean acquiring skills but also learning what are essentially tricks. I’ve often told people about my dad saying ‘let the saw do the work’ and it taking me another 20 years to realise what he meant (don’t over work it, establish a smooth rhythm). If you know the trick, then the skill often becomes easier to achieve. About 45 years after my dad first said that, someone watching me make stage sets remarked on the sheer speed of my sawing and I gave a little inward smile.
Last week I mentioned to Shelley Art Group the old watercolour sky trick. Skies often have deeper colour at the top of your view than at the bottom. If you are using watercolour the liquid tends to run downwards, taking the pigment with it. If you are painting on the flat, then it tends to run to edges of the area you are painting. If you are painting a sky, then turning the paper upside down makes the pigment run to the top of the sky. which is usually what you want. If it is a blue sky with white clouds you can dab the clouds out using an edge of cloth or tissue.
Knowing the trick doesn’t guarantee a result but it usually means that you are not working against the materials. This in turn allows you to concentrate on developing the skills to make the best use of that trick. As with my sawing, you suddenly develop more freedom and control in what you are doing. In watercolour that often means that you can use wetter applications of paint that flow.
In one group of people I painted with, one of them had been an art teacher and went to the Slade Art School. I watched him working on a scene with figures. This is a hard thing to do. He did the background and then sketched the figures on separate pieces of paper and cut them out. He moved them about the painting till he was satisfied, changing figure size if necessary, then marked them in place and set to painting. I’ve never forgotten that trick and I now use it in digital sketches for painted works. The painting at the top of this piece is one I was asked to do, of a kestrel sculpture I made that is down in Bristol. I had a couple of photos and I played with layouts, using a mixture of bits cut from photos, that I moved about and changed the angles of in Art Rage, and digital paint for the sky. When I was happy with it, I painted the sky first, using a mixture of palette knife and brush, then added the house roofs (palette knife). Finally I cut out the kestrel, moved it about, changed size and shape slightly then marked it in place and painted it on. I moved the rod, that holds it up and allows it to be seen from different angles as well as possible, so that it was there but worked best with this painting angle.
One of the simplest tricks people often forget about is to keep standing back to look at what you are doing from further away. Find some way of standing it up and look from the other side of the room. Do it often. If you are making a sculptural object, put it somewhere that you can walk round it and peer at it from different angles. You don’t have to develop a skill for this one, just remember the trick. If you are working digitally keep zooming out to get the same effect.
I’m Steve and I’ve been trying to make art/craft in all forms since I was little. Alongside various sport, it has been a constant in a much changing life. I have painted, drawn, used most printing techniques, sculpted, made posters, drawn cartoons, made furniture, designed made and painted stage sets, painted murals, landscaped gardens, made animated images and who knows what else. I keep trying and sometimes I am more pleased than others with what I’ve produced by the time I get to the point where I am just going to make it worse.
Alongside that I have also been involved with computers since the 1960’s. I have always been the person who can be given the most technical problem to solve but I was very pleased when someone said of me that I was also the person who could talk to any person at any level of an organisation and explain how things worked and how to use them best.
When home computers came along, I bought one to explore and to get my children used to them. I wrote and amended graphic computer games for them. Being a cruel person, I made them do arithmetic tests scaled to their age to get into the games. All the neighbourhood kids came round.
In 2003/4 Wayne and I went to New Zealand and walked the Milford Track. Each day I walked of ahead and then picked a spot and sat and sketched. People came along and looked at what I’d done and chatted. I’d been playing with my own website for years and after the walk I put all the sketches up there and everyone, from all over the world, who’d done the walk knew where they were and could look at them and remember the spots.
About 10 years ago Ruth bought me a Microsoft Surface, which is an iPad rival. I experimented with it but realised that other tools were often better suited to what I wanted to do. I did take it along to my eldest daughter’s birthday party to play with and ended up surrounded by kids and I gave each of them a new painting to work on in turn. Afterwards I put them all up on Facebook and they were shared around all over again. This year I put a new web page on my current website called The Fridge Door and I put those party images up there alongside all the images of kids’ art I had collected over the years. Cue a lot of sharing and relatives and friends being entertained once again.
Using computers I have put images on T-shirts, sent images to other parts of the world, put scenes on table and cup mats, sketched out designs, helped people get messages across by simplifying them into cartoon like images.
Today’s session should help you further along your journey to explore what a computer and a few apps cane do to add to your creative fun.
Dedicated to the dreamer/doers such as David Mayne, Mick Kirkby Geddes and Helaina Sharpley. This post was also inspired by my sister-in-law Jo asking me to do a painting of one of my sculptures. It has a free idea for any of the above artists to use.
About 67 years ago when I was around 7, I was wandering through the hectic school playground and one lad was sat on the hard ground, next to the wall with railings on the top, sketching a Cowboys and Indians scene. I never quite understood the fascination with the topic but the picture of the sense of movement and activity has stayed with me ever since. I now realise that I’ve been trying to capture some of that all my life. All those attempts over all those years have only ever felt partially successful but I keep trying. Other people have more attention to detail, a better inner vision and less shaky hands. I do often look back and think that something is better than I originally thought and people often say they like what I’ve produced. I try hard to ignore the look of those just don’t get it or see only the rough edges.
This is a recent painting of mine. I hope you can see the similarity to what I’ve described.
This is a sculpture I did first for our garden. This one, that Jo wants me to paint, is down in their garden in Bristol.
It was as I thought about how best to capture it in a painting that the clarity of the sketch/movement theme came to mind. Added to that is light. Below are a couple of David Mayne’s sculptures, which we have instinctively put against the light. Excuse the cobwebs. David plays with both light and movement.
Helaina describes her sculpture as drawing with wire and she attempts to capture the everyday using just wire. She also plays with light by putting the result in a white box. A theme of Helaina’s is also the delight in the everyday. I’ll let you look at here website but here are some that I did at a workshop she ran.
I hope you are picking up the threads here. My paintings have also been likened to Stanley Spencer and Lowry. Not in quality I hasten to add.
So what is the idea? Well the kite sculpture is against a sunset, as is the Dunraven painting. I recently did one of Morris dancers dancing up the dawn as well. So I’ll go back to trying to work out how best to paint the kite and I leave it for David and Helaina. or anyone else, to produce moving, living sculptures of the everyday by backlighting them with a subtle sky line and light. If you can capture for me skylarks and their noise as you walk across the moors then even better.
When I was young, in north London, there were extended family gatherings at Xmas. A regular one was at my aunt’s house in Harlesden. All Barrow-in-Furness expats would gather along with strays gathered in London, such as the actor Peter Swanwick and my older cousins boyfriends. The house was a long thin maisonette with a dog legged corridor leading to a back dining parlour and small kitchen. A lot of people could squeeze into that space, chatting, drinking and talking to other Barrow expats on long distance calls.
One Boxing Day all this was going on while I played on the front step with my four year-old brother. He fell and hurt himself and I ran down the long corridor to tell mum. As I got to the door into the back room I trod on a mat that slipped backwards and went flying forward, putting my hand through the glass door. I suspect that event has shaped my life in surprising ways and retracing the sequence of events helps understand that.
The first thing is that I suddenly became the centre of attention and the shocked, mainly passive, focus of other people’s actions. I also became an observer of all those actions. That may be the first effect on my life. Over the next few years there was a lot of attention and observation going on.
My mum was a very practical and bright person and a nurse and midwife. She took control. I was carried to the front room, while someone was despatched to phone an ambulance. Mum assessed the damage and realised I had severed and artery, amongst other things. She told my uncle to get something to use as a tourniquet and, when he came back with a scraggy piece of cheesecloth, sent him in no uncertain terms to get something stronger. Effect number two, pay attention to mum, she is boss.
I don’t know whether people know about tourniquets any more (we used to practice them in the Scouts), but they are very effective if applied correctly. I watched fascinated as she used the tourniquet to control and lessen the blood loss. Lesson three, my body has an inside and my mum knows how it works. That red stuff is important.
Soon after this the ambulance arrived, at the same time as my startled dad, who I think had been at work. He was dispatched to go with me, while the scene of the crime was cleared up and mum took car of my brother. To be fair to dad, he arrived shocked and late, had instructions shouted at him and had to sit as a passive watcher and waiter, while other competent people did things to me over the next long hours. Neither my dad or my uncle seemed to be people who controlled much.
I hope you are not squeamish, but the next thing I remember was people holding me down and picking at the inside of my arm with tweezers, to remove pieces of glass and inspect the damage in detail, to formulate a plan for complicated surgery. I had severed blood vessels, nerves and tendons in my wrist, sending the tendons back up into my arm, so I am so very grateful to all the people who saved my hand and possibly my life that day and over the next few years. Subsequently, I have realised that I also probably owe much to the surgical advances made in the Second World War. The kind of micro surgery involved in the reconstruction was very new then.
I will not go into a boring, blow by blow, account of all the things that happened afterwards but they had a wide range of effects because I had become an observer. People put electric currents through my hand to try to stimulate the nerves. They put my hand in hot liquid wax that gave a warm glove to stimulate blood circulation and tissue growth. The wrapped my arm and hand in plaster coated bandages to support it while it healed. I still managed to put a ruler down inside to stop the itching, which I don’t think helped with the scars.
They also devised a special metal spring device to keep my hand straightened out and to build up power when I tried to use the hand. The kids at school called it a knuckle duster, so I had to find out what one of those was. I watched and tried to understand what was going on. I realised how useful practical skills were.
Next they started getting me to do practical things. One was weaving and I have always understood how cloth was made ever since. I was bought plasticine and pipe cleaners to make models to increase my dexterity. I have never stopped making things since. A woman teacher called me a chatterbox and made an origami dinosaur head and put it on my desk. I have been able to make those and other origami figures ever since. I once organised an entire university drama course year making origami swans for a project.
The hand that was worst damaged is still not very skilled. but I have learnt ways to accommodate. At least it is not really suffering from osteoarthritis like the left one, because that one has done a lot of hard work. The hand is not the point though. The effect on my life has been wide ranging. It made me intent on learning how to do things. When I spotted someone who could draw well, I copied them and practised until I became reasonably able. It made me a better observer and gave me a wider understanding of all sorts of thing from bodies to mechanicals. It gave me an awareness that if you can’t do something one way, then try to find another way. I think it made me more creative.
So thanks again to all those who helped me along the way.
I have been aware of digital art most of my adult life, i.e. since the early 70’s. I’ve made static images, animations, games, manipulated videos and sound. The tools that are available now are astonishing. That said, alongside a phone to quickly capture some aspects of a scene, below is what I use mostly when sketching:
It has in it mechanical pencils with soft drawing leads, short very soft pencils, a mini paint box, water filled brushes, rags, two tiny sketchbooks…… It also isn’t affected by awkward light reflections and doesn’t run out of power. The image below is in that bundle still.
On my Android phone I have a copy of Art Rage, which works on all the main computers. This one used just my finger as a pointer/pen/pencil. Waiting for a tram in Soler on Mallorca, I could draw this quickly without getting out and balancing, pad,water, paints and pencils.
The first thing to remember about digital art packages is that media rules don’t apply. While you can appear to be painting with oil and a stiff brush, you are just applying dots of colour. If you use a pencil effect, you can expand the the size of the lead to huge proportions, add colour and get that grainy effect of a soft pencil on grainy paper over whatever area you want. You can change the settings of the tool, for instance to make the pencil or charcoal softer or more grainy. If the tool doesn’t give you the effect you want try another one. This lack of rules applies whatever the App you are using.
While you are just applying dots when you work, the apps and devices are very sophisticated nowadays and can often detect pressure and speed to recognise gestures. In this way they try to reproduce what you would get when using a brush, pencil or other tool on paper or canvass. To get the best out of this, the ‘pen’ device and App may need to match. Procreate on Apple is matched to the Apple Pencil and even different models are better matched than others. Don’t forget my finger drawing though.
The final thing I’ll say for the moment is that there are three tools on all Apps that you can use. First, Undo, which usually allows you to go back several times to pretend you didn’t just do what you did. Second a variable size Eraser that will magically rub out paint too. Third is the ability to change the Settings for each tool, for instance to add more thinners or paint. There is also the opportunity to save what you have done so far and start adding to it in another version (left swipe the file on Apple).
I’ll keep adding to this post with more detail later. See below.
Good luck.
What are you trying to draw/paint?
Here are a couple of finger doodles on the phone:
These were done very quickly to send via WhatsApp. The second one was during a FaceTime with Ruth’s grandchildren, when they were laughing at my eyes popping out. I sometimes play ‘swap the doodle’ with my grandchildren or send quick visual jokes and birthday wishes to them. The digital art apps are great for that but if you are thinking of a digital version of a paper image then it gets a little more complicated. As with any medium, it is easier if you create images that fit with the medium. All we need to know for the moment is that it helps to have an idea of what you are aiming for. If you are aiming for a particular size of printed image, then try to start with an image of that size.
Cutting and Pasting
I am now going to half contradict that statement above and introduce another tool. The image below is one I was working on, using techniques I had never used before, which are much akin to collage. It served to reassure me that I was getting somewhere but I didn’t like the colours of the feet at the bottom and the cars needed more variety. So I made a new copy of the image and started altering it. I simply rubbed out the feet and started again, having worked out better ways of doing that bit of it.
The result was this one:
You can see that the feet are completely different, I’ve added soil and subsoil layer and also creatures. There is extra colour and variation in the cars too. At this point I realised I had made the wrong shape decision at the start, so I was able to set up a new blank canvas and select a portion of the old one and copy it in.
I was much happier with that, so I added a few subtle changes and settled on the finished image (for now…). So don’t give up.
Importing an Image
Last week I was at a workshop on using palette knives, which I am not very practised at. I kept at it afterwards and produced the image below:
As an experiment I imported that image into the art app I was playing with and added a transparent layer on top (thank you Linda for the idea). In that layer it took around 1 minute to carelessly add some snow. Here is the result:
I use this technique to make things like Christmas cards.
While the landscape images above are here, we might as well look at a quick paint app version, done in a bit over an hour, using my finger as a pointer on an Ipad. I think it is not as good and would have to work hard to make it match.
Here is a version done on my phone:
In both of those images I tried to use the tools available to get a bit closer to the hard copy original. In the ArtRage package there is even a palette knife tool, but I couldn’t get that physical feel. A quick play with Procreate was even less satisfactory, but I am less experienced with that.
I’ll finish this particular post by repeating earlier advice. Treat the digital art Apps as a different medium. Play with them to see what works for you. Discover how they work best. So far I have discovered that ArtRage seems to work better than Procreate at reproducing different media while still being flexible in use. If you paint or draw detailed and smooth images, rather than textured, then the Apps might make a better job of reproducing what you do. Here’s one about us travelling through the world, that was digital from start to finish:
Here is one, called Dancing up the Dawn, that I’m working on. It uses all the techniques covered above:
This is much more complicated and there are basic figures that I have taken from previous work and then altered for this picture. I have used multiple layers to play with the arrangements. If you put a piece of the image in a higher layer, then it will cover the lower layer, so you can play with different overlaps. Even with the background I use two layers to try out different effects, once I had the basic layout and sky. I later went back to the top one of those two layers to play with the shadow effects. You can merge layers when you are happy to make it all a bit simpler to remember and make them temporarily invisible when you are having difficulty working out which layer is which.
Finally on Layers, the canvas is also a layer. You can choose between different canvases. The texture of the canvas will have an effect on what the paint does. All the layers, including the canvas, can normally have varying levels of transparency, so the can either cover up lower layers, where there is drawing in this one, or merge in. This is generally true of the canvas as well, to that the canvas disappears when the marks are printed. This is important if you are sending it to some one to print on a T-shirt or other object.
This image was taken by starting with a watercolour sketch I’d one, adding to it an altered cut and paste from a photograph and then playing with it all in the art package to get an idea of layout. This was then worked up into an acrylic painting.
I’ll just finish by saying a bit about the apps that you can use. There are loads of them and there are similarities but also many differences. I have found that there is no one app that is good for all purposes. They all have quirks. It also depends on the type of computer you use. Apologies that this starts to use jargon but at some point you have to understand different file types, print sizes and other such technicalities to get the best of what you are doing.
First remember photo manipulation apps such as Photoshop or Lightroom and free equivalents, like Gimp. They often have tools that are useful for image manipulation. It may be quicker to export your image, adjust it and then import it again. Next there are simple art apps on most devices that can be a less daunting starting point and a more icon led and more intuitive than apps catering to constant users. Finally there are alternatives to the obvious contenders such as ArtRage that I now use and RealWorldPaint.
When I was sixteen I painted this image of the patterns made by cars and people at a Zebra Crossing. I’ve always been a bit obsessed by patterns of movement and the paths made through the world.
When Shelley Art Group set a fungi challenge, I had a picture in my head but realised I would find it hard to realise in paint, so I tried with an app called ArtRage and was pleased with the result, as were others.
I now have an obsession to realise some of those ideas I have never managed before. Meanwhile my other obsession with Schumpeter and Appropriate Technology has sent me on a slight sidetrack involving creating lots of digital images to incorporate in other pieces.
After several years of problems with Arthritis, I’ve been having to reassess some of my creative activities. I’ve given up chair-making, I’m less physical in the garden and sculpture may tail off from now on. I’ve been concentrating on painting but until I joined https://www.shelleyartgroup.com/ I’d been a drifting a bit. Here’s one on Fungi that has been well received:
Here’s one on our obsession with cars that is still ongoing:
I’ve also come to a decision about my involvement with Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I’ve been talking to people about creativity informally at YSP for around 40 years, but around 15 years ago I started taking tours round there, doing the same. Apart from hip replacements I have been doing that ever since till last year. I have tried other roles there but have not been comfortable with them. You have to know your own limitations. So farewell and thanks to all the people who have helped me at YSP over the years. You may see me wandering around chatting to random people or sitting sketching. I still have my own series on trees to fill up and and my very rapid sketch of the herons could do with more care and attention. Sayonara.
