I'm Auctioning another Tree Painting

I wanted to let you know that I am auctioning off another of my tree paintings. This time it is a watercolour I painted on Briar Road in Sheffield, created on heavy quality, watercolour paper, measuring 28 x 37cm. The last one sold for £200 in the end, which was wonderful.

If you would like to own this painting, you can bid on the auction website or, if you are not on Facebook, you can email me your bid. There are lots of other lovely things for sale on the STAG auction site, so it's well worth a bit of a look.

All proceeds go to the legal fund to support the Sheffield Tree Action Group's protests against the council's intention of chopping down yet more healthy, mature trees in Sheffield. It's been a long, hard struggle and thousands of trees across the city have been destroyed, but we have had some success recently and the council have been forced to meet with protesters to discuss ways of managing the situation.

So, whether you are interested in helping to save Sheffield's dwindling numbers of mature street trees, or just like the idea of a lovely tree painting on your wall, get your bid in now! You just leave the bid as a comment on the post. Easy peasy.

Instagram Take-Over Day

Next Wednesday, I am going to be taking over the Instagram page of Hobbycraft. I was invited to do it via someone at Derwent Pencils, who sometimes sponsor me by sending me lovely parcels of free art materials. 

I was a bit confused about what it was all about at first, but it turns out that what they want me to do is to select some of my drawings, which will then be posted to the Hobbycraft Instagram page over the course of the day. I will also be around to answer any questions posted.

I made a little film in the studio too, to introduce myself, give a quick tour round my workspace, and show some examples of what I do. Here's a sneak preview:

If anyone doesn't already follow me on Instagram, you might want to know that my personal account is here. I regularly post drawings, paintings, photographs (usually of lovely, grungy, rusty textures) and my textiles pieces too. Take a look.

Anyway, maybe I'll 'see' some of you on Wednesday. Hope you enjoy the film.

Illustrations of 'A-Day-in-the-Life'

In my last post, I told you about the day of sketching I did in the offices of a team of architects. If you remember, it was slightly different to my usual work: this time, the client wanted the sketches as part of an illustration for a report. 

The original brief was to create a double-page spread of images, which communicated what an architect did all day. I did as many sketches as I could on my day out, with the idea that we could choose the best, say 5 or 6 images, which I would montage together later, using Photoshop, to create the final illustration.

But when the researchers saw the 13 sketches, they didn't want to use less than half of them. It seemed a waste. What to do? They went back and looked at their costings. They had the idea of an illustrated pull-out, which would give me six A4 pages to fill with illustrations, instead of just two. They spoke to their printer and asked for a quote. I waited with baited breath...

… and a couple of days later, I got the go-ahead! 

The researchers sent me a list of additional text and quotes that they wanted me to add to the images, taken from the research notes that were made on the day. I had to write each quote out by hand, so it would match the text I'd drawn originally, and then scan it all in. I used speech bubbles for a lot of the new text, to add visual variety and stop things getting fussy.

I spent all of Monday at my computer, laying the images out. In the end, we only had to lose one sketch, because 12 worked out so well: two images per page. 

With all that extra text, I decided the individual sketches needed boxes around them, so the pages looked less bitty. But I didn't want formal, computer-drawn boxes - they needed to be sketchy. I drew half a dozen with my rainbow pencil and scanned them in too. 

Here are the finished 6 illustrations, in order, through the architect's day. I think the effect with the boxes works rather well in the end. I am relieved that they are being used larger too, as I was concerned that the text might be a little hard to read, if I had to squeeze lots of images into a much smaller space. 

I have sent everything off to York University. I can't wait to see how it looks as a pull-out.

A Day in the Life of an Architect

So what do architects do all day? To be honest, I wasn't really sure.

I know they design buildings and spaces, probably more on a computer than at a drawing board these days, but that's where my knowledge stops. Or stopped. Last week, as it happens, I got the opportunity to find out, first hand, and I took along my sketchbook, naturally.

I had been commissioned to create an illustration for a final project report, by researchers at York University. The project analyses and discusses how care homes are designed and built, and why. The researcher who contacted me said she would like an image which gave some insight into what an architect did during a typical day. 

I wasn't that happy about doing it though, because I didn't want to draw it from imagination, since I had no clear idea what they do, or what their environment might look like. I said the drawings would have much more of an authentic and natural feel if I was able to see and draw an architect actually at work. So the researcher paid me to spent a day at an architect's practice near Selby. Perfect.

They were tucked away in the grounds of a stately home turned hotel, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It was quite a journey to get there. I arrived just as people were preparing for a big meeting. My job was to shadow one particular architect, April, and sketch her activities through the day.

The meeting was really interesting, with about a dozen people around a big table, discussing a project which was obviously in the early stages of development. 

It was very animated, with lots of back and forth, pointing at drawings and making changes to plans because of various problems. It was much more tricky to capture than all those meetings at the Morgan Centre, where people mostly sat and listened, but I did my best. 

After lunch, April went back to her desk to work on a drawing for a different project. She showed me a print-out of a long building which the client wanted to appear like a terrace of buildings. 

Her designing was indeed mostly done on the computer, but she did also do some hand-drawing, working things out. She felt that the shapes of the ends of the building needed altering, to make the overall effect more attractive, but this had knock-on effects to the footprint of the rooms and the roof-line. So she sat and sketched for a few minutes:

One of the surprises for me, was how much collaboration went on. The office was a large, open-plan space. But although individuals had their own, quite spacious work areas, people often got up and went to chat things through with each other.

So it was a far more sociable job than I might have anticipated. It seemed like fairly high pressure though. 

I was pleased that I managed to capture quite a few different elements of the work. What I have to do next is find a way of putting together a selection of the sketches, to create a montage. 

The final illustration is to be a double spread, so two A4 sheets. The York researchers are going to have a meeting tomorrow, to chose their favourite images from everything I created and to let me know if there is any additional text they want to incorporate, then I have another day to fiddle around in Photoshop and bring things together. What an interesting project it has turned into.

You can see many more similar reportage projects on my website here. If you want to discuss a future project, contact me here.