Waiting

Winter is well underway in England at the moment although being on the south coast we get quite a bit of warmer damp weather to break up those lovely frosty mornings.  For me, I find myself quite pleased to get to December.  It always seems quite a short month and near the end we have Christmas - with all its many reasons for enjoying it. 

This is a pencil portrait I did which I've called "Waiting", suggesting the season of Advent when we wait for the festival of Christmas. It comes from a photograph I found on Pexels - a resource of royalty-free photographs which I've only just discovered.  This photograph was taken by Engin Akyurt who is a brilliant photographer with many images contributed to Pexels.  Thank you Engin! 

Google Photos never ceases to amaze me.  I was down at the beach last week and took a photo with my phone of the waves crashing on the cliffs.  A couple of days later, Google Photos gave me a notification that it had done something with the photo and when I looked at it I saw that they'd transformed it into something really nice by bringing out the colours in it and making it really sing. 

And finally, here's one more drawing I did last week - the model was Rick from sktchy. 

sktchy Art School

For the last three or four months I've been working through some pencil drawing course on sktchy Art School with tutor France Van Stone.  France is a highly accomplished drawer as anyone who's got her book Sketch will know.

France has courses on pencil and iPad sketching with modules on beards, eyes, wrinkles, cross-hatching and even one where she uses both drawing on paper and on iPad as a useful comparison.

I've learned so much from these course about simplification of materials (just a couple of pencils and a sheet of copier paper is enough!), building volume, proportions within the face, and so much more.  These courses are a reasonable price and of course you can come back to the video lessons over and over again.

There is also a useful community aspect to the school in that you can post your drawings and receive feedback from the tutor and other students.

OK, so the subject matter is a bit limited (portraits) but if that's what you want to learn about then sktchy Art School is a terrific resource.  Anyway here are four of my fifty or so drawings which I've done in the last few weeks.  They're all A4 size (about 8"x11") and are all done with just two pencils on mixed media paper. I'm reasonably happy with them but still have some way to go to.   

A lot of pencil artists try to draw in a photo-realistic style, with incredibly smooth textures and a considerable amount of blending.  I am pleased to say that France Van Stone likes to see the pencil marks and so do I. I see very little point in slavishly copying a photograph so that it looks like a photograph.  Surely a work of art should bring something else to the table than "wow, that's just like a photo!".  

The sktchy app

Well, having had a major birthday last month (one ending in zero) I finally got hold of an iPad - I've resisted all things Apple for a long time now, but I've had to admit that when it comes to art apps, its hard to beat.  In particular I wanted the sktchy app which presents you with a portrait photograph every morning for you to draw or paint.  I also wanted ProCreate - perhaps the best digital drawing app.  Neither of these apps are available on Android tablets or phones. 

I've loved using sktchy and have done a number of drawings from it in the last couple of weeks.  We went away last weekend for a couple of nights in the seaside town of Hastings, just up the coast from where we live. I enjoyed getting up early in the mornings and immediately looking up the portrait photograph of the day and trying to produce something on paper to do it justice.  Here are a few of my efforts.

Hastings itself is an interesting place with quite a few artists working in the town and a prestigious gallery called the Hastings Contemporary.  We didn't have time to visit but I would have liked to have seen the current exhibition by illustrator and cartoonist Quentin Blake.  

We stayed in a really nice apartment on the edge of the Country Park.  We saw a green woodpecker and a greater spotted woodpecker in the tree outside our apartment and a pair of badgers came around at night looking for food.   

The weekend was finished off by us replacing our elderly Vauxhall with a new(ish) car - a Citroen this time which is a treat to drive with all its various gizmos.  It makes me realise quite how old our Vauxhall was and how cars have moved on in recent years.