SketchDrool: Drawing and Eating!

Yes, following on from the regular SketchCrawl, then our SketchJam idea, we SketchCrawl North sketchers have coined another new term: the SketchDrool. It combines two of my favourite pastimes - drawing and eating!

Last Friday night, despite unbelievably torrential rain, a small group of us met up to go to the preview of a new exhibition of screen prints by Mick Marsten, at Pete McKee's A Month of Sundays gallery in Sheffield.

It was really nice stuff. We thought that the foul weather might put people off though, but the show was packed. It was nice to bump into several people we knew and chew the fat over a glass of wine and some nibbly things.

Afterwards, we crossed the road to Otto's restaurant, where we had booked a table for a drawing evening. I took along my Inktense watercolour pencils, my trusty waterbrush and just a tiny A6 sketchbook. I managed to grab one sketch for each section of the meal. 

Serious food-sketchers, like sketch-buddy Matthew Midgley, did their drawings before they ate, but I couldn't resist getting stuck in while it was hot, and only stopped to draw half way through.

As soon as my main course arrived, I realised that mushroom risotto was not the wisest choice... 

It tasted delicious but was mainly white, not to mention consisting primarily of impossible-to-draw rice! I was happy to stop and sketch though, as it was very rich and I was getting seriously stuffed.

While we waited for our food to settle, we had some more wine and moved places, so we could chat to new people and have new angles to sketch from. This is Moya, who I met at my clay modelling evenings:

After a bit, the waiter came to try and tempt us with the desert menu but, though puddings might have been fun to sketch, we all groaned and took the sensible option of ordering coffees instead.

It was great fun to try something a little different and worked especially well for having a combination of stalwarts like myself, Andrea Joseph and Matthew, but also some first-timers. It was a lovely evening and an idea I'm sure we will repeat. 

Creating Pastel Artwork for a Picture Book: a Demonstration

Since starting this blog, several people have asked me if I could make a film demonstrating my pastel technique. I wrote a step-by-step illustrated guide, talking through the creation of a cover illustration for a US educational project. It's taken a while to get round to working out how to do the films though.

John and I did done a couple of try-outs earlier in the year, with the how to draw a cat and how to draw a dragon films. We've learnt from those and this new film is tighter and more adventurous, showing me working on a real project in the studio.

It's the perfect time, while I am creating the artwork for Swap!: I wanted to show you something 'real', rather then re-create artwork. John filmed me doing this piece, where Lucy, having enjoyed being a dog all morning, starts to feel a bit bored:

Of course, the artwork took more than twice as long to do, what with all the messing about getting the lighting set up and working out the best way to talk through what I'm doing, and continually stopping and starting, but I'm really pleased with how it's come together, so it was well worth it. 

Big cheer for John, who did all the filming as well as getting his head round all the technical editing stuff. If you enjoy it, please share it with your friends, so we can get the hit-count up a bit. Cheers!

Illustration Workshops and Picture Book Artwork: Dogs and School Don't Mix!

On Friday, I was out doing the last of my talks and illustration workshops for the Summer Reading Challenge project in Sheffield libraries... 

...but for the rest of last week, I have been working steadily on my Swap! artwork. Up to now, I have mainly be concentrating on Lucy, so I thought I'd have a change and do a couple of the Sparky vignettes. This is him enjoying school, during a 'Music' and a 'Quiet Reading' lesson:

I was particularly pleased with the French Horn as it was incredibly complex to draw. I managed to find some great reference material. I had also sketched a French Horn player a few months back, during a SketchCrawl in Buxton, which was probably one reason why I thought of that instrument to get stuck on Sparky's head.

Illustrating a Picture Book: Girl Turns into Dog!

Colouring the first spread was a joy: a bold image like that is perfect for pastels. But next I decided to tackle some of the more fiddly bits. Four of these vignettes will appear together on one page: Lucy is trying out being a dog, digging holes, chasing flies, napping... The central image is different. That one comes directly after the first spread I've already coloured. Lucy she is making her doggy disguise: 

Doing these vignettes early on is my way of getting to know the Lucy character, before I have to illustrate her in more complex images. Fiddly images are a bit of a nightmare in pastels though!

Whenever I have several small images which will either appear in sequence or are very similar in content, I generally try and colour them together, like this. It's quicker and also helps to ensure that colours remain constant. Also, if several vignettes are going to appear on the same spread, I need to design the colours to balance across the page as a whole.

Illustrating a Picture Book: Feedback on the Endpapers

Remember how I created the ballet-dancing endpapers for Swap! as a final joke? 

Well, my Art Director rightly pointed out that we can't very well use the same design for the endpapers at the beginning of the book, because a) it will spoil the joke and b) nobody will understand what it's all about yet.

So I set about thinking up other, more normal activities that Sparky and Lucy could share. It took a while, as I wanted them to be either cute or funny or both. I also needed situations that didn't require either backgrounds or large props: making sandcastles at the beach was out, as was playing on the swings. I did adapt both the beach idea and the park though:

These are the others I've come up with. I had 6 ballet poses, so I thought it would be good to match that with 6 normal poses, to put into a spot-repeat, just the same as at the back.

Illustrating a Picture Book: Starting the Pastel Artwork

I haven't yet got the final go-ahead on those last few redraws, because my art director has been on holiday, but most of the illustrations for Swap! are ready to go. So last week I finally gave in and started tracing-up on the light box. It's such a tedious task, tracing each illustration onto my pink pastel paper, and I have to do it in the dark too, despite the sunshine outside (groan), as the pastel paper is too thick to see through otherwise. 

It was great to get stuck into colour though. I started with the first spread of the book, not because I like to work through in the correct order, but because I had clear ideas about the colours things needed to be (pretty much pink, pink, pink), so it was a safe place to begin. 

It was also a comfortable way to find the main characters, as they are very large on the page. I  was imagining Lucy blond, but concerned that might not jump out of the page as much as brunette, especially as I am rather fond of soft, pastel coloured backgrounds (which we will drop in later, digitally).

I wasn't sure what colour to do Sparky. Black would be tricky for showing details, white a little boring, brown a bit dingy and dull... I wanted him to stand out from the backgrounds too, so I chose white with tan bits, to make it more interesting and colourful.

You can watch me create a piece of my pastel artwork in my new short film, made in the studio.  

SketchCrawl at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

We had a lovely day last Saturday. John and I drove up to Wakefield, to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where we met up with many regulars, but also several first-time SketchCrawlers. There were at least 25 of us, which was a really nice size group: enough for the event to feel really well-attended, without so many that you are a mob.

The weather started off looking a bit dodgy: still pretty warm, but very overcast with iffy clouds which might turn nasty. We all sat on the grass in a ring around this sculpture, by Plensa Borofsky. You can't really tell the scale from my sketch, but it is MASSIVE and towered above us. We only had 30mins, which was a bit daunting, so I used my Inktense pencils, as they are great for super-speedy colour work.

The future of the weather was still uncertain as I was drawing this great Miro character. John and I visited the Miro show when it first opened and I the drew some of the other cute characters. I love them. Wouldn't it be great to be mega-rich enough to have something like that in the garden at home?

By the time I had finished drawing the Miro below, it was starting to brighten and we were able to have lunch in the sunshine.

We next moved down the hill a little, to the Camellia House. Some people drew the trees inside, some drew the little glass-house itself. I didn't feel inspired though, so had another go at the half-woman-half-rabbit sculpture by Sophie Ryder. Last time I used graphite and watercolour, so this time I tried mimicking the wire (it's like a huge Brillo-pad!) by using a fine-liner and then just a little watercolour to tint.

The last sketch was Seated Figures by Abakanowicz. Back to the comfort of my watercolour pencils, as I wasn't at all sure what to do with this one. There were far more headless figures than I've drawn, in a long line. It was crying out to be drawn in perspective, but the technical stuff looked like a lot of work, so I concentrated on colour and mark-making, to capture the essence instead (a crafty cop-out).

An unusual twist to the day was that the Open College of the Arts, who created the filmed interviews done in my studio, were making a short film of our SketchCrawl. They filmed us at work throughout the day and then did an interview with me afterwards about SketchCrawling in general. I will put the film on my website when it's ready, as the OCA have generously let me and the YSP use it.

Illustration Workshops in the Library: Disaster Averted!

On Monday I was in libraries again, for the Summer Reading Challenge, doing events similar to the series of summer workshops I've been doing in Sheffield, but just a bit further up the road, in Derbyshire.

It was a very good thing I wasn't far afield, as I was a complete idiot that morning: I left my folder by the front door at home, the one with all the artwork I use to talk around. Not good. I realised my mistake as I was walking into Sheffield station, but there was no time to go back - my train was due in 15 minutes.

As usual, John came to the rescue. He drove my folder all the way to Brimington Library for me and hand-delivered it. He was so quick off the mark that he beat me there - what a hero!

This is me using some of the roughs that were in the folder, to explain the process of designing the big bear in Bears on the Stairs. I also showed them a piece of big, pastel artwork from Stinky! and read them Dragon's Dinner, deconstructing my illustrations as I went. Then it was time to get stuck into some drawing.
The children first learnt how to choose faces and body language to communicate emotions... 

...then we all created lots of angry, sad, frightened, shocked, sarcastic and grumpy cats, dogs, bears, owls, warthogs, monkeys, hamsters etc.

After lunch my minder and I nipped down the road to Staveley Library, where I did it all again.

Both the workshops were really well attended: we had to squeeze everyone in, so a big thank you to the guys at the library service for their help with publicity.

Trying Out Printmaking: Colographs and Monoprints

I have been meaning to experiment with print-making for years and I never seem to get around to it. But I found I needed to teach some very basic monoprinting and colographs, so decided that the time had come to get stuck in.

When I was up at the Solway Firth recently, I collected lots of interesting things from the tide-line on the beach: seaweed, tangles of fishing wire, seagull feathers, a washed up shoe and other detritus, I've added more bits and bobs from around the house and garden, so I now have a cardboard box full of fun textures to play with.

I had great fun sticking them onto pieces of cardboard with several coats of PVA, creating some experimental colograph plates, to see what works.

While I was waiting for them to dry, I had a go at some monoprinting. I didn't have proper inks, so just used acrylic paint and PVA. We happened to have a set of A4 glass place mats, so they were perfect for rolling out the colour.

Acrylics are not good for colographs though: they are not sticky enough and dry too fast to be practical, filling all the gaps when they do, ruining the plate for future prints. Luckily a friend who runs printmaking workshops was good enough to lend me some water-based printing ink (thanks Pete!), so I have now been able to do my first experimental prints.

It's all a bit ad-hoc and, because I haven't got a press, so can only burnish by hand, the intaglio element is pretty minimal, but I had a lot of fun, got jolly messy and at least now have enough experience to pass on what I have learnt to the kids I'm teaching.

I think this monoprint is the textile-designer in me trying to get back out!

Sketching in the Park: a Sneaky Day Off!

We woke up to a glorious day on Friday, despite a very so-so forecast the day before. The sun streamed into the studio and the sky through the veluxes was faultlessly blue. As I went through the mornings emails, I thought sadly about the day ahead: my re-roughs are all in and my paper is all cut to size and ready, so my next job is to pull down all the blinds, so the studio is good and dark, and then stand at the lightbox for about 2 days, tracing my line-work up onto the pastel paper.

I looked out at the sun again and over to the lightbox. There was no real contest - it took only about 3 seconds for me to decide to bunk off instead.

So John and I packed a rucksack with books, sketchbooks and bananas and walked to the Botanical Gardens, where we laid out a blanket and chilled in the dappled shade of a tree.

It was so nice to have no agenda for a few hours. I finished my book-group tome (in the nick of time), did some sketches of the trees and people watched. Much better idea!

Donating Co-Editions to Libraries

I've been trying to tidy up the studio a bit today. I need to get down to more work on my new book, but there are piles of stuff on every surface and it's a nightmare. I don't work well in mess: I have a threshold but, once crossed, I have to sort things out.

So to free up some shelf space, I've had another clear out of my foreign co-editions. 

The publisher sends me at least one copy of each co-edition that's printed. They are great fun to see and sometimes I use them in my school workshops, but they do clog up the shelves. In any case, I think a book, especially a children's book, should be out there with a child, not stuck in storage in my studio. 

So, every so often I have a blitz and give them all away. Sometimes they go to relevant individuals but, if not, I donate them to Sheffield Libraries. There's always a big demand for children's books in a wide variety of languages, but with budgets what they are at the moment, it's not considered high priority.

So, authors and illustrators: dig out those foreign-editions, donate them to your library and free up some space in your studio too!

Drawing a Picture Book: a 2nd Round of Re-draws

This week I am working on Swap! again. 

I sent the last of the re-draws off to the publisher a few weeks ago. Normally they turn them round really quickly, but it's holiday time of course. Actually, I didn't mind the delay: it did me a favour and gave me time to fit in all those library workshops.

We are so nearly there now: just one spread that needs a 2nd redraw and some extra work, creating a different set of endpapers for the front.

The redraw is the illustration of the ballet class above. It's the part of the story when Lucy discovers she can't swap back to being a little girl again. My art director felt their dialogue needed to be closer to them, as this is a crucial turning point in their relationship. But Mum is in the way, so she suggested I incorporate more parents and sit Mum with them at the back, creating a new space for text in the middle:

It's not awful, but I'm worried things are too busy and slightly 'bitty' now, with so many characters. I spent ages yesterday afternoon, moving the various elements around in Photoshop. It would be compositionally better if the parents were smaller, to provide visual contrast, but then they would look too far away, turning the space into a massive hall.

I got a bit blind to it in the end, so John came to help and provide a fresh pair of eyes. He suggested I go back to the original and work harder at moving Mum out of the way.

He also suggested trying Lucy much larger, which does indeed make for a more dramatic composition. It means she's not quite as close up to Sparky for their disagreement, but the overall effect is less fussy. I have sent both versions to my publisher. I never normally recommend providing alternatives; my experience has always been that, if you offer 2 choices, the client always like a little of one and a little of the other, so you end up having to do a 3rd version! Let's see...

Sketching Workshop: 'Colour Games'

The delegates at last month's Urban Sketchers International Symposium, got to choose 5 sketching workshops, from the 13 on offer. As an instructor though, I had to deliver my own Quick-on-the-Draw workshop in 3 of the 5 slots, so I could only choose 2 to take part in.

On the first morning, I did Nina Johansson's workshop. For my other, I chose Jason Das, partly because I like his work, but also because I am very interested in colour and always keen to try doing new things with it.

Jason's workshop looked at the relationship between the colour of the line and its body colour, and the effect of using a coloured line, rather than just black. We each did two drawings of the same place, on either side of the page in our sketchbooks. On one side we used a cold line (I used a blue gel pen) and the other warm (red pencil). Then we painted them both, in much the same way, and brought everybody's books together, to look at what worked best. 

I definitely like my blue line best (but that's partly because the gel pen has more oomph), which was why I chose blue line for the next exercise. Jason asked us to do two similar drawings again, but this time with the same coloured line. We then painted them differently: one with naturalistic colour, one with colours as mad as we could manage. I decided to do one big drawing across the two pages but colour it in two halves:

It was quite hard choosing unnaturalistic colours, but for most people, the crazy colours were more interesting.

We were just getting into the next exercise when the sky went black (very strange, since it had been unremittingly scorching until then). Then the rain came - very sudden and very heavy. We fled for the tiny bit of cover there was under the arch in my top sketch.

Then, just as suddenly, it was over. I sat back down on the ground to continue with the next exercise. Though I was on a sitting pad, so thought I'd stay dry, the rain wicked up from the bottom edges of my shorts and I was soaked to my bum when I stood up again.

This time we each did a line drawing in black, but swapped our sketchbooks with a partner, so everyone coloured someone else's sketch. I drew the statue with the palms, while my partner drew me drawing the statue and palms!

It was really fun to colour someone else's work, liberated from any preconceptions or plans made during the line-work about how it should be done. I decided to have another go at the crazy colour idea, which is why I have green hair. The sketch in my book looks nothing like I imagined, which was so interesting.

The other interesting thing was that, though we each got our own line-drawing back at the end, we all agreed that is was the colouring that created 'ownership' of the sketches.

Thanks Jason - it was really good fun. I intend to get some coloured gel pens and to experiment more with contrary colours.

You can see all the other sketches I did during my trip in the Dominican Republic sketchbook on my website.

Illustration Workshops for the Summer Reading Challenge

As I mentioned recently, I have been doing lots of work for Sheffield Libraries lately, running illustration workshops. It's been quite a schedule: I've been out every other day, at 2 libraries per day, and I've done 10 libraries so far.

It's been fun doing something just slightly different. I start by analysing some of my books and showing artwork at different stages, pretty much us usual, then I share practical drawing tips on how to bring characters alive using facial expressions and body-language, which I act out. 

The finale is new though: the creation of a big Story Lab illustration. We build a visual narrative a bit at a time. I get the children to choose the characters and come up with all the ideas about what they might be doing, which I sketch on the flipchart as we go along. I show them how to do the drawing with me: I act out all the positions for us to use as reference (which is quite a laugh), then we build the characters to match, starting with simple shapes.

At the end, I think up quiz questions on the things I've talked about, and the winner gets to take the signed Story Lab illustration home.

We had the best session of all on Wednesday afternoon, at Ecclesall Library: we had 35 children turn up - so many we could barely cram them all in the room! They were all really up for it and came up with some great ideas. We created a surprise birthday party, being sabotaged by a cat diving into the big birthday cake using a trampoline, knife and fork in hand! Very silly.

Sketching Workshop: 'Challenge Through Limitations'

I promised to give you the details of the workshops I took at the Urban Sketcher's Symposium recently, in the fabulous setting of Santo Domingo, so here is the first one...

I took Nina Johansson's workshop last year in Lisbon and so knew it would be good this time too. This year, she challenged us to use unfamiliar and restrictive tools to make us draw in new ways. She was so generous and let us play with the various media in her kit, but wouldn't let us use anything 'easy'! 

The first thing we did though was to 'ruin' the paper of our neighbour, by splashing paint, walking on it, rubbing it in the dirt or anything else we could think of. The idea was to get rid of the intimidating white paper, so we were less precious about what we sketched. I did some printing off the pattern of a car tyre for my partner; she got into spashing paint around. Then I drew fellow-sketcher Jorge Royan onto my ruined page, using Nina's bamboo pen and diluted ink.

The images above were hard for me. Nina made us draw on coloured paper with just a white gel pen and a black pen, which challenged us to create tonal values very differently. The 2nd drawing was done with a fat felt pen, so detail was difficult to achieve and everything had to be reduced to either black or white. 

Nina wouldn't let us paint unless we used impossible brushes! The one above was done entirely with something not unlike a pastry brush: very wide and bristly. Luckily it was just right for describing the ancient brickwork around the arch and using it edgeways, I could manage the railings. Getting the figure right was tricky though and the pigeons on top got splatted when I closed my sketchbook too soon.

I have been wanting to try out a bamboo pen for a while, so got very excited with this one (and the one at the top), which may be why I upset the black ink bottle I had balanced on a rubbish bin, and ended up with ink all down my leg and into my shoe. Worth it though. I have bamboo in my garden at home, so am determined to try and make a pen.

I went for something safer next: a fat, wax crayon. It forced me to simplify, since it was impossible to draw detail again and I had to describe the figures by using the strong light on their clothes.

I left Nina's chunky 'rainbow pencil' until last, as I thought it was a bit like something a child would use, but actually, once I started to draw, I discovered it was wonderfully smooth to use and the marks were great. Again, it made me control my lines in a new way and was too fat for fiddling about, so the result is unlike anything else I did while I was at the symposium.

Thanks Nina - another brilliant workshop and really well prepared. Great fun.

If you enjoyed this, try another of the symposium workshops: 'Colour Games'.  You can now see all the other sketches I did during my trip in the Dominican Republic sketchbook on my website.