one of the reasons I make these photographs of drawings is to try and learn from them. I once was Peter Hewson examine his work in a mirror because he says that is the only way to notice any problems and for me that is true with the photo. In this case I noticed that the tip of the nose wasn’t right and I went back and changed it on the drawing. Still I think she looks dignified if a little sad – whether the model will feel that is another matter.
Sent from my iPad
Here’s one I made earlier – this one is more of a likeness I suppose.
Sent from my iPad
Over the past few weeks I have become more interested in tone rather than likeness. I have been told many times that the mind creates an image and in many ways the more you leave out the better for the mind. So I have been looking at shapes and tones within the face and their relationship to one another than striving for a likeness. This has been a very frustrating week so far for me. I started my new art course this week and the work I produced there was appalling. I spent much of Tuesday trying to exercise the frustration built up which fortunately I was able to do. In the process I reexamined a book I had bought some time ago discussing the power of tonal value in a drawing – especially when trying to capture the likeness. As with many things in life some of it made sense and others I will have to think about but there is no doubt that may development is starting to move in new directions. One final thing. I have completed my latest photo book – this time of my drawings. Today I intend to send it to Blurb to publish – lets hope it works out ok.
Sent from my iPad
It is so strange to hear cutting edge programmes from the past discussing the future and realising that no one really has any idea what is going to happen over the long term. I was listening to a podcast from the archive of In Our Time, one of my favourite radio programmes. This one dated back to early 2000 and was discussing the future of information technology. Bragg was talking to two people who had just written a book on the subject, one with a pessimistic view of the future and one with an optimistic one. The most striking thing was that neither understood how the world would change over the next ten years. One example illustrates this:
In 2000 200 million people had a computer. Now over 500 million people are a member of Facebook alone – something that wouldn’t come along for another 3 half years. Neither even mentioned the new driving force in information technology – mobile access to the internet/communication.
Sent from my iPad
Having just watched The Social Network again I can’t get ‘Baby you’re a rich man’ by the Beatles out of my head, in fact it is playing at the moment as I am typing this. Anyway, a question for Facebook – why haven’t you developed an ipad app yet? I have the iphone app but this is really clunky when using the ipad.
Anyway, the drawing…just did this by eye rather than using the Colestream method..I like it…hope someone else might.
Sent from my iPad
I thought I would try to be a little freer with my drawing today so I tried to make a cartoon sketch – it is harder than i thought.
Sent from my iPad
As I came to write this I have discovered that the Apple keyboard doesn’t have a hash mark key. I am sure that there must be a way of creating such a mark but I am not aware of that at the moment . Interesting.
The reason why I have called this Untitled is that I am currently working on my next book entitled Untitled. This is the default heading for all drawings etc created in Brushes and I thought I would use this. The book will be a collection of digital images of my drawings created by using the iPhone, iPad and Brushes. I find the process interesting because it is a away to measure my development over the past 12 months. Hopefully it will be completed in a week or so. As they say…watch this space…
Sent from my iPad
Over the past few days I have been working on a whole assortment of little projects, preparing a selection of prints for a forth coming exhibition, research into the iron age buying a new pair of shoes – the list goes on and on. One of the things I have been neglecting is the sketching I so enjoy. Well I have started to concentrate on this again with a series of drawings of Keira Knightley based on screen shots from perhaps her best movie to date, The Duchess (That is, of course if you discount The Bill or Phantom Menace – this is a joke BTW).
One of the advantages of the screen shot is that you can really examine the face and try different approaches to try and capture something interesting. IT isn’t like drawing from life but rather a forensic examination of one person’s face – the line of the check bone, the relationship of the eyes to the nose and so on. This allows you time to really get to know the face of one person in one instance in time. It matters not that the person is nothing like this in real life it is just the capture of that moment. For me the problem I had was with jaw line – Ms Knightly has a wonderfully pronounced jaw line and trying to capture this was always a problem. I’m not sure I have managed that yet but this is a start. I am using the Apple wireless keyboard to type this and it is so much more enjoyable than the on screen keyboard…so top tip … if you have an iPad get a keyboard they become so much more useful things and the Apple keyboard is such a dream to use. Anyway, that is enough of my rambling on – another advantage of the keyboard.
Sent from my iPad
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