Wedding commission number 2!

This one is very close to my heart, as my wedding present to my brother and now sister-in-law was to create their wedding invitations, dinner menus for the big day, and other assorted artwork to give their event a personalised, handmade quality.
They had already put in so much work to make their day exactly as they wanted it, so I had to create work which would fit the theme that was emerging. That theme was somewhere between a music festival and a village fete. So, in the early days when the Save The Date notices were being sent out, I tried to create a very bold, simple take on a 1960s music festival poster. Which meant balloon text, plenty of colour, and a kind of cartoony riff on art nouveau-style arches of text and image.

The design was created in one go in simple black ink on white bristol board at A4 and then scanned and reduced to A5. The colouring was all done, infuriatingly slowly, just using a mouse in the photo editing package GIMP 2.0. The textured paper background was added by layering the coloured image over an existing textured stock image and creating a transparent colour. The kind of guiding principle was a loose theme of 'day and night', to carry on the festival vibe, so the text on the left hand side has a blue through green colour scheme, surrounding a cartoon sun, and the text on the right ran through red and purple tones around a cartoon moon. Little details like the block capital text and stars were included to keep it from straying too far towards childlike, and mirrored the Haight-Ashbury style posters I was referencing.

The invitations themselves were a bit of an excuse to experiment, to push the theme of the Save The Dates a little further and create something totally unique. It was also a way to introduce some physical artwork which I hoped to carry over in to the wedding itself. I bought a large roll of craft paper (carrying over from the textured paper backdrop of the Save The Dates) and drew out another cartoony art nouveau style arch frame, this time filling the rest of the page with a slightly acid-inspired sunflower motif (another request from the bride). The arches and sunflowers were all drawn with chalk pastels, on a large scale, then photographed and resized for the A5 invites. The idea being that for things like the running orders or direction signs for the big day, I would be able to inexpensively create them on the spot with similar design work and there would be a thematic visual link throughout.
The next task was to create, in ink on bristol board, the names of the bride & groom in a hand drawn hippy-esque font. Once this was photographed and posterized, I used an abstract pastel drawing of an evening sky (which I had tweaked to make as vibrant and dramatic as possible) and created a clipping mask to use that as the fill image for the text. Once I had that, I created another transparency and pasted that over the chalk-drawn poster. I used the petals and corollae of the sunflowers to paste text for the date of the wedding, which was coloured to match the overall design that was emerging. This poster was then superimposed on to a brick wall, just to differentiate it from the Save The Dates a little more and to make it seem a little rougher, like a real gig/event poster.

Next we needed something to put on the front of the service order for the church. While still wanting to continue the themes we had developed, I needed to be a bit more restrained so took a completely different approach. I went to the church and took a lot of reference photos. From these, I picked one which showed the church from the perspective of the duck pond just opposite, nestled amongst the trees there. I created two different pastel images; one a very traditional, slightly naive landscape drawing in daylight, the other a more abstract image in sunset tones of red, pink, purple etc. (to continue the day to night theme). I created a clipping mask using the bride and groom's names and used the bold colours of the abstract image to make the text visible over the landscape image without having to use outlines. I added a very simple line of white text for the date of the wedding.

Last, but not least, I was asked to come up with a bold, simple portrait of the couple to display. Now, this went through a LOT of various iterations, from superheroes to Simpsons characters, before the bride's love of cats won the day. My idea for this image was to create a kind of a spoof on Royal Wedding memorabilia, those odd tea towels and mugs that sit threadbare or coffee stained in your royalist aunt's cupboards. Instead of a stiff portrait of young bluebloods, we used cartoon cats in wedding attire. The rest of the design was created very much on a first draft, just an evening of sitting and seeing what came out in terms of freehand font design and creating a fussy, self-consciously gaudy border design. My plan was to keep the lines bold enough that it could be a tattoo design or something from a vintage zine, which was my way of keeping it from becoming too saccharine and losing the comic effect of the absurdity of the image. This image was framed and took up residence first next to the wedding cake display, and later in the day next to the wedding guest book. Copies were printed up and used in the running order and table plan, and some have been given as gifts. 

The text was then isolated using GIMP and resized to use as a header on the wedding menus. The menu was simply a Word doc made using a custom font downloaded from Font Squirrel called Inknut Antiqua. I loved it's slightly irreverent, off-kilter take on a formal font, it seemed to capture the tone we were looking for, and it was in fact a holdover from the church order of service cover design. They were printed on to thick, off-white paper so they could be propped up on miniature easels on the dinner tables.

I loved having the opportunity to be so involved in their big day, and to be able to work on one project over a long time and develop ideas and themes that could develop. It was also a great excuse to learn a few new techniques, get some practice in old techniques, and collaborate with a 'client' safe in the knowledge that we could be honest with each other when things didn't work and be given reign to experiment on my own terms while still aiming to give them what they wanted.

Latest commission - wedding comic!

I was recently commissioned to do my most ambitious piece, a two page framed comic that a bride-to-be wanted to give to her groom on their wedding day. The comic was to include anecdotes and incidents from their lives, and it had to feature a cameo from Judge Dredd (his favourite character)!

The first thing I did was meet with the client to talk about what events or stories were going to be included. I got as much information as I possibly could, so I'd have plenty of material to whittle down to two pages. While we talked, and after, I was starting to form the idea of how to structure the panels. I started designing the layout, and once I was happy with that I wrote a script for the narrative text boxes and speech bubbles. I decided early on to adapt the stories as if they were simple adventure tales, so for example a holiday that included a tricky day out on a tandem bike became a struggle against sentient killer tandems, or a whale watching holiday would now be the two of them patrolling the seas in full karate pose, ready to fight off evil-doers and whale poachers.

While the recipient was a Judge Dredd fan, he was also a DC Comics fan, and considering the subject matter I thought the visual style of Golden Age or Silver Age DC would be a better fit than the grimmer, violent, noirish 2000AD style. Taking my cue from Dick Dillin-era Justice League comics which I had in trade paperback, I mapped out the exact dimensions of the pages which allowed me to size out each individual panel. I then used this framework to draw up a rough of the final piece, just to decide placement etc. The title, Nerd Mag, was another in-joke.

(Click pictures to view)

Then I picked up some Bristol board and doubled the dimensions of the pages above so I could include more detail (a technique that I only learned about when visiting comic conventions and seeing how real artists put their pages together). I asked the client to provide me with any photographs she could, so I could at least make a decent attempt at a likeness, and luckily these days pretty much everybody has a sizeable cache of photographs. Many of them were from the holidays that I was drawing, although I was much more concerned with representing the stories as cleanly and simply as possible. First, I laid down the frames in pencil, then inked them, then started pencilling the artwork. After that, I inked the panels ready for colouring. Where needed, I found it easier to write up text on separate sheets and glue them in place over the art work, to try and cut down on any mistakes.

I would have been tempted to colour digitally, in order to minimise the possibility of making mistakes that would be hard to correct given the relatively short turnaround time I had to put this together, but since I don't have a drawing tablet and my computer set up is pretty basic, I decided to take a chance and colour everything using Copic and Promarkers. From there, it was sent to a scanning/printing shop in London Bridge, Colourcentric, who did a great job of resizing and printing the work. They evened out the colouring as well, which was important in ensuring the finished piece looked convincing enough to pass as a real comic. In the future, I'd prefer to do this part myself, but the finished boards were just larger than A3 and large format scanners are tough to come by, and because of time pressures I was happy for someone else to turn this all around within a day.

Next up I scoured Orbital Comics looking for something very specific: a comic in to which I could staple my pages and have it look like it belongs. This was harder than expected, as the comic couldn't be too old, as the comics pages would be the wrong colour, or too recent, as my pages' white gutters would stand out against most comics these days which have a tendency to print in colour right to the edge of the page. In the end I found one which fit the bill, and loosened the staples and took it apart. I had two copies of my artwork, and stapled the two pages opposite each other with one or two pages in between so it would look more natural.

You can see above a disparity in the skin tones; the printing process had left them a little to pale so I used the same skin toned Copic I had before to put that colour back in. The page on the right is finished, the one on the left is in progress.

Finally, I had bought a large box frame in which to mount and display the comic. Using superglue, I pasted the back cover flat and the front cover slightly raised, so even though it was mounted vertically, it would look like it had been left open on a flat surface while being read. Each page was then carefully glued to the one below.

One minor speed bump was that, because I essentially had two identical pages fully stapled in, I accidentally ended up displaying the non-coloured pages rather than those I had retouched! After taking these photographs I punched up the skin tones on this version.

All in all I'm proud of the end result. I would maybe have liked to dwell more on the pencilling but the time limit I was given to finish actually helped me be less obsessive about the artwork. I think it captured the right tone, the right kind of lighthearted fun. And, it means a lot to think that I'll have work on somebody's wall from one of the most important days of their lives.

Life Drawing week 7

A few false starts trying to use pencil left me reverting to charcoal sticks this week. For whatever reason, it felt like I was even slower at getting the gesture poses down than normal. Too much time on the torsos, not enough on blocking out the rest of the figure.

Some doodles, essentially, trying to mess around with line economy, seeing what is essential to the drawing and how to create depth without heavy shading.

I actually really liked the dimensions here but again got caught out with time trying to perfect the back before moving on.

Unfortunately this took some heavy charcoal transfer from another drawing on the way home, but again I quite liked the overall shape. The left leg especially seemed to work well.

The redrawn line of the stomach was a huge readjustment; I held a pencil up to the angle, transferred that across and drew the diagonal line you see from the armpit down, which made me change up the rest of the drawing.

This longer pose took a huge amount of time to get underway and still has some glaring issues, which may have been fixed by including more detail. I didn't really capture the part-turned chest. There's not much to this one, really.

The second model's approach to gesture poses was much more energetic, which really helped lossen up my approach. Even though I don't feel like these were 'good' drawings, at least I was unafraid to just attack the page.

I liked the way these were going, and would have like a couple more minutes to get the legs on and see whether I could represent the weight distribution.

The last piece felt a little disjointed, the arms were too big and I think the angle from which I was looking foreshortened the legs a little and I didn't readjust. Or perhaps it's just the right leg, and if I'd have made it clearer that it was stepping forward the mismatch in the foot position wouldn't have been as bad.

Overall a bit of a stalling week, although I have learned that I should just start the session by loosening up and not worrying out any final product. Again, too cautious.

Charcoal Practice - full study

As much as I enjoy the life drawing classes I often find myself frustrated at not being able to follow through, to finish the drawing to a state where I'm happy with it. Obviously that's the point, to work under pressure and get faster by necessity, but I felt a little pent up last night at not really making the most of the session, so sat down with a reference image from artmodeltips.com and, using Canford Dreadnought Grey paper and a set of compressed charcoal sticks I spent approx. three hours on this piece.

(Click to view large)

It took some getting used to; I think I must have spent at least an hour messing around with the sticks and struggling with the tone to use on the stomach area. I'm still not totally convinced, and think that's the most problematic area, but I think it at least has texture and believable roundness. The shading on the upper chest, under the chin, also caused untold issues. In the end, I felt that I was in danger of tinkering the piece in to oblivion, so I shaded once more and moved on. The left hand seems a little small but when checked against the reference photograph it seemed OK, so perhaps it's just the angle that it is being held at foreshortening it. perhaps by making the fingers taller it would have suggested that better. The foot was an area where, once I had a likeness to a foot, I backed away for fear of ending up with a slab of confused charcoal mush.

I like the highlights; always the best part of using any toned paper. The point of the upper back/shoulder especially helps offset the picture and the hot highlights on the thighs stops it degenerating in to a samey tone of mid greys. I purposely chose not to use a black and white image, or to filter it to black and white, as I may have done in the past, and as I want to force myself to interpret the light as it is rather than using too many assists. A practice like this is only useful if it has some challenge to it.

(Click to enlarge)

Background added just using tonal shades and a lot of smudging

The other challenge was how long it took to dig all the charcoal out of my pores.

Life Drawing week 6

Another week of trying different techniques to get the gesture poses finished in 5 minutes, but I've still yet to develop an effective method. I tried standing back and swiping out the shapes, standing back and tracing the major lines of the shoulder, hip, knee and foot, and still I find myself zeroing in on detail too early, or failing to capture the proportions.

This pose was relatively successful, and probably could have been salvaged to create something once the left shoulder had been dealt with. Again, though, I found myself without the necessary time to get the whole posture on the page.

I tried something different here, just to use big, heavy sweeping lines. Not massively successful.

This slightly longer pose (it may have been somewhere more like 15 mins) allowed at least for some definition and shading to create a three dimensional effect. Aside from obvious struggles capturing a face or the complexities of the hands, I thought this was OK. The foreshortening of the right arm needed work but should have had the hand involved to be effective.

This was my favourite piece of the night, probably the only one that had real promise, although there are definite problems regarding the relative size of the torso to the hips and thighs. The distance from the waist to the hip was too large, so adds extra length overall where it is not needed. Also the calves and feet are too short. The right arm, too, is far too small.

The obvious error here was in trying to add a fully detailed head. It is too large, at the wrong angle, and also just pretty badly drawn. It's a shame, because without it the torso could have worked. The left hand was tricky as only the pinky and next smallest finger were visible so it was always going to look awkwardly undersized. I think the left thigh runs on slightly too long; the knee should be pulled back and the shin allowed to angle more. Another example of the unfortunate tendency to straighten things out rather than capture angles as they are. Quite like the right hand though, for a quick sketch. Just wish I'd left out the head unless I had time to actually draw it as it was.

Next week, I'm going to mix up the techniques again and try using pencil, rather than willow charcoal. Maybe, by using a more forgiving, but more accurate material, I can capture something different rather than the rather heavy going outlines I'm currently finding myself drawing.

Life Drawing week 5

So this week I only kept hold of the drawings made from longer poses. The earlier, gesture poses had very little that made them worth taking home, as in many ways I felt like I had regressed from the first week by over-thinking basic poses and stalling on minor details while failing to capture the overall sweep of the model. However, I reverted back to using willow charcoal sticks and found that, for this kind of work, it really is the best medium, using the side of a stick to block in areas, breaking it down to manageable pieces, using large sweeps, it was far more versatile than the charcoal pencil I had been using.

Again, this led to a few issues with proportion. This piece captured the model quite well though, even if an initial misjudgement meant that it ended up much larger on the page than intended. In the end, I actually quite like that it removes some of the more extraneous parts and focusses just on the rounding of the back and relationship of the hip and thigh, and I thought the left forearm showed the foreshortening. The upper arm needs a little work, the armpit doesn't have the required effect, and I wish I'd have got the outline of the right leg in to balance the piece.

This piece was another example of moving on to detail before nailing down the basics. The shaded line down the back was originally where I'd placed the outer line of his back, and had started working on detail of the left hand and all of the right leg before realising that the whole pose had angle and proportional issues. The small image in the bottom right hand corner was the class tutor giving me an example to work from of a skeletal frame which captured just the basic lines and joints. This gives me a starting point for future drawings, and made me totally rearrange the torso of my drawing here, which I think led to it being at least partially successful. The thigh is still a little short, not by much, but when it's as prominent as it is here is sets the whole picture off a little askew. The head could do with a little size reduction too. The weight running down in to the feet seems decent though, and with a little adjustment the resting forearm of the left arm could be better integrated. The neck could use some detailing, it might help to bring the head in to the rest of the drawing.

From here I will start using the basic line figure sketch to nail down the angles and sizes of the model before I start 'drawing'. I think that being able to break the figure down in to manageable, simple lines is just something that I'll have to learn with practice. It runs counter to how I've taught myself so far, so the hardest part is unlearning or at least postponing those instincts. I think that the desire to immediately start impressing with recognisable detail is holding me back from constructing these images properly from the ground up, which is what is leading to such inconsistent results. Some weeks, quick sketches turn out in proportion and expressive, and some, like last week and this week, quick poses seem sloppy and unfocussed. It really is a case of drilling myself to, at the very least, produce something with the right proportions. Any detail, at this stage, is a bonus.

Life Drawing week 4

We started with a ten-minute warm up this week, and I tried block out, in horizontal lines, my major 'landmarks' (shoulders, hips, waist, knees etc.) before starting, to try and ensure that the page placement wouldn't slip again.

I wanted to get the majority of the pose in but once again found myself hooked on adding detail to the back before finishing the whole pose.

During the three minute to five minute gesture poses, I tried this week to experiment with completely different drawing styles. With this pose, I tried to keep my eyes off the page and on the model, and use bigger, simpler lines. Line economy seemed important in the early stages. In the end the scale and proportion of this pose was way off.

Again, I tried to just draw without thinking. And again, the legs ended up far smaller than the torso demanded. A shame, as I quite liked the line that traced the shade along the rib cage down the side.

Trying to capture the muscle dynamism in the arms. I'd have liked to capture the weight distribution of the legs but these were still very short poses.

This was approximately a ten minute pose, but I don't feel that I captured any depth. I was using a charcoal pencil, rather than willow charcoal sticks, and I think this made me more cautious with the line making and reluctant to layer on shading as I should have. 

Another short pose with proportion issues, that also lacks weight and depth.

We briefly switched models, and this 20 minute study captured some of the brittle physicality of his form. Again, though, without rounded shadowing and contrast it looks too flat.

The last 20 minute pose and, again, a different technique as far as drawing. This time, I decided to stand at a full arm's length from the paper to draw. It made seeing the proportions on the page easier as there was no need to scale up or down. The left leg ended up a little short, and without the required feeling of bearing weight, but other elements worked quite well. The head size is incorrect, I think due to the model naturally shifting during the time and my not adjusting to it. Again, willow charcoal should have been used to give the shading purpose and depth.

Life Drawing practice - 90 minute photographic pose in graphite

To try and make my live life drawing sessions a little more useful, I want to do more timed practices to get basic pose gestures down a little quicker. The website artmodeltips.com has a decent array of poses from a variety of models. The plan is to do at least one timed-out practice from these a week, photographing the process as I go to see where adjustments happen and to make sure that I'm applying detail only when ready.

3 minutes: I tried to capture the whole pose in as short a time as possible. The general sweep seemed OK, you can see where amendments have been made already to the left arm and side and the right leg.

10 mins: Detail added to the face and upper torso. Usually I leave the face until the very end but the angle of it seemed important to how the pose worked, in pulling the spine around to the curve which decides the position of the legs. At this stage the torso down to around the middle rib level is pretty much set.

20 mins: Once detail was added to the torso I could see the proportion issues in the lower body. The hips were lowered, the curve from the waist to the hip lessened in severity and the thigh straightened out. Detail marks were added to the stomach and legs. At this stage, the whole pose is largely finished, at least in terms of basic outline.

35 mins: a few touch ups but this time was spent almost exclusively on adding detail to the face. The angle of the nose was especially important to get right, to ensure that the downward cast of the face was as it should be.

60 mins: without a fixed deadline, I decided to concentrate on completely finishing the head. After that, I worked on the upper arms and around to the forearms, which meant I could sketch in the hair and be totally finished with the top part of the drawing. Next, shading in the shoulders, ribs and back meant that the tension in the arm muscles were in context. Anchoring the navel in allowed the rest of the drawing to be completed using the centre line that curves from the hollow between the collarbones all the way through.

90 mins: all shading added from the hips down through the legs. Contrast added by erasing the smudged pencil from the line of the right side that runs along the inside angle and down to the top of the knee cap, and along the outer edge of the left thigh.

Finished sketch after returning to it some time after. Tweaks to the jawline, left side of the stomach, and further defining the left clavicle area by removing some of the shading.

Overall this was instructive. For one, there's the issue of positioning on the page. I'm not visualising the finished drawing on the page so ended up unable to finish the full length of the pose because I ran out of paper. Next time I'd like to try measuring out the key signifiers (i.e. top of the head, bottom of the chin, shoulder, hip, knee, and foot, if a standing pose) and mark those horizontally on the page to work to.
The face bears a passing resemblance to the model but was really there to ensure that the picture works as a whole. It looks kind of like an older painting, less photo realistic, but I quite like it. Next time I may try and hold off on detailing the face so closely as early as I did, just to get through the pose as a whole quicker. Working down from the torso was useful as, judging from most of my previous attempts at figurative drawing, I have a tendency to shorten the lower body somewhat, and it's much harder to remove that once it has been lined in too heavily. In longer (20-25 minute) poses in life drawing I'd be tempted to line the pose out in graphite and check proportions before adding detail in charcoal, if I have time.

Life Drawing week 3

I managed to get a few more poses down in the shorter, 3 minute gesture practices but definitely need to find a way to get through a whole pose much quicker.

A couple of very quick warm ups. The pose on the left is kind of a mess, but the pose on the right generally captured the proportions of the arm, torso and left leg

Trying to save on paper led to a pretty weird playing card effect. The pose at the top again just about caught the proportions.

A short standing pose that had some issues with the left leg (thigh too long) but showed some promise. The left arm is clunky and the right arm is just there to hold the space but could have been fixed.

A longer standing pose that worked fairly well, albeit very sketchy. The left arm was the first thing in so needs work at the transition between upper and lower arm, and the hand obviously ended up as just a sketched shape. But the muscle tension in the buttocks and legs shows the weight distribution quite well, and the back suggests the arc that the head thrown back would have finished. The back of the head is too high and too straight so doesn't quite capture the pose properly, I think this would have made a huge difference.

A longer seated pose, which caught some of the posture right. The left thigh is too thin, and the transition at the knee is awkward. Also the right arm is a little narrow. There's an issue of proportion where the left side of the chest slopes off at a sharper angle than the left shoulder, which means that the neck and head position would need amended. With a bit of work though this could have been fairly accurate.

The first short warm up pose with the other model. A lot would need fixing here, the left shoulder is too sharp and tall, and the left hip and leg are totally incorrect. But the line sweep from the right side of the chest through the knee was promising.

The longest pose of the evening, and the most finished. The left forearm should be a little longer, or more readily suggest that the foreshortening is a result of it being turn slightly towards the viewer. The left thigh is also turned towards us, which would have been better suggested if the left shin and foot were turned more towards us.The shin seems a little short; the ankle region truncated. The foot is too parallel, if it were turned flatter and angled slightly down if would help suggest the proper shin angle. The right foot is OK but perhaps could have been more rounded, i.e. the little toes dipping behind the top of the foot.