Building Practice #3

More sketches of buildings from my holiday photos!

First, we have Knaresborough, in Yorkshire - there are the most amazing chequerboard buildings there. This one is Mother Shipton's Cave (although as I understand it the cave is some walk away, I think this is where you bought tickets. We were just stopping off on our way through, so we didn't investigate the cave)

Next up, and slightly off-script, is a sketch purely from my imagination. It was going to have some figures in, but I worked for longer than planned, and my bedtime sketch was accordingly cut short. 

Thirdly, Micklegate Bar, York. This was just down the road from our hotel, and I walked this small section of the York Wall several times. I also did the whole Wall walk with my mother. 

Next, Chawton, in Hampshire. This is the village where Jane Austen spent the last years of her life. This little set of cottages is on the short walk between Chawton Cottage, where she lived with her sister and mother, and Chawton House, where her brother lived. 

This quick piece is based on a photo I took in Clifford's Tower, York. My photo did not feature a cat, of course, but I thought it needed one.

And finally, (in this set) we have Kynance Mews in Kensington, London, which I for some reason forgot to label. This is what happens when you throw things together when you really should be going to bed...

These were all done in Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro.

Building Practice #2

After sketching buildings from holiday snaps in black and white for a while, I began to be sad that I was missing all the colours, so I upped my game and turned to colour:

I started with the Hartley Mauditt church in Hampshire. Such a cute church, it's all that's left of the village of Hartley Mauditt (and fortunately it had a sign, so I knew where it was!)



I hadn't planned on doing two churches in a row, but my father asked me to sketch our friends' church, St Mary Magdalene at West Tisted. This is a flint church, so very different from the one at Hartley Mauditt. 



Next, I chose an amazing building somewhere in Hampshire. So many levels!



After that, I thought it was time for a thatched cottage. We saw a lot of them in Hampshire, but this one is in Godshill, Isle of Wight.



And finally (for this post) a 15th century farmhouse. At the time of sketching, I didn't know where this was, hence the label reading only 'Hampshire', but when I posted it on Instagram someone very kindly told me it was Goleigh Manor in Prior's Dean. The wonders of social media!



I've actually been having a lot more fun with these than I thought I would! And as I have a lot of material in our holiday photos, I plan to continue. The aim is to be able to draw interesting and realistic houses from my imagination, eventually... but it's fun to make use of the holiday photos!

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

Going Fishing

I wasn't sure what to do with Colour Collective's 'Hooker Green' prompt, so I decided to rather boringly use it as foliage, and combined my CC with another building practice. 

This is based on a photo I took in Robin Hood's Bay, Yorkshire. We had been there before, but wanted to go back - a train ride from York to Scarborough, and then a bus to Robin Hood's Bay, but we made it! It was a fairly grey day, with some drizzle, but it made for some very spectacular photos. I was playing around with one of the art filters on my camera, and took two shots of most things - one on normal camera mode, and a second with a filter, which really took advantage of the overcast sky.

Here's the photo I based this on. I loved the way the filter on the camera really highlighted all the textures. 

Adobe Photoshop CC2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro. I think I spent about three hours on it in total. 

Building Practice #1

I thought I really should practice drawing buildings, which have never been my strongest subject. So, I thought, a good way to do this would be to take some interesting buildings that I photographed on holiday, and sketch them, starting with really old buildings, where wonky lines are practically required.

I started out doing black and white sketches, and then moved to colour. But for this post, I'm going to compile just the black and white ones:

Somewhere in Hampshire. We spent a lot of time driving around with our friends, and Hampshire has a lot of winding roads (with no names!) so sometimes I have photographs but absolutely no idea of where they are. Other times, of course, I know exactly where things are, such as this 16th century hearth passage house, which is opposite the square in Petersfield:

This rambling cottage is opposite St Andrews Church in Farnham, Surrey. We were there on our last day in Hampshire, to hear our friend sing in a choir concert in the church. 

And this little place is on North Street in York. York is fabulous for wandering down roads and finding ancient buildings.

All of these were done on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro, using Adobe Photoshop CC2018, and Kyle Webster's 'sketch pencil rough' brush. 

SCBWI Draw This: Light

I had a bit of downtime, and thought I would take part in the monthly 'SCBWI Draw This' prompt. The theme was 'light', and I used it as an opportunity to practice perspective with no direct reference. To make my life harder, I chose to do 3-point perspective, which is the type I am the worst at - but hey, I'm not going to get better unless I practice, am I?

I thought it would be fun to have several references to 'light' in my illustration - moonlight, candle light, light as a feather, light as air...

Head below the cut to see the truly horrible sketch I did to try out the general idea, before I got my act together and made it pretty:

Midnight Chase

Back in September 2016 I did a piece for Colour Collective's 'Venetian Red' prompt. I really liked it, but it had a lot of flaws - my Colour Collective pieces usually do, I don't have the time to plan them out properly, so they're always a bit rough and ready. I thought it definitely had potential though, so throughout February I worked on a remake of it after finishing work for the day. I was completing some work books that were heavy on stranger-danger and online predators, so I felt the need to completely step away from such work before I went to bed. I wasn't enjoying that assignment!

I think it looks much better now, and is worthy of being in my portfolio. I used my original as a sort of extended rough and colour study, and this time around I spent more time fixing up my perspective and playing with different textures.

Here's a progress animation showing the evolution from original linework to finished piece:

I've been trying to keep more of the freshness of my sketched lines in my final pieces lately, so for digital work I've been experimenting with sketching as normal, and then going over those lines with colour, so that the original sketch is still visible. At the moment I'm quite liking the effect. Here are my original sketches of the figures, and some close-up shots from partway through the illustration (when the figures were pretty much done):

As you can see, I didn't bother much with the man's feet, as they were going to be completely obscured by the bridge anyway. I just needed to know roughly where they were so that he didn't end up looking like he was about to fall over. 

Here's a look at the two pieces side-by-side:

This was done in Adobe Photoshop CC on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. It took somewhere between 20 and 25 hours, I think, over the course of January. 

Design: Save the Dates

Here's a look at some Save the Dates I designed recently for a lovely couple – I'll be doing the rest of their wedding stationary in due course, but these were the first things up. 

The floral design and colour scheme will be carried throughout the paper goods, and the Save the Dates have a watermark illustration of the ceremony venue behind the text.

Here's a clearer look at that illustration. I did an image search for a lot of potential views of the building, and they chose the one they liked the best. It was very, very small and fuzzy and had trees in the front, but I was able to create something new from it, using clearer photos to work out the details:

I also put together a monogram for them to use with wax seals on their envelopes. I made up a .ai file in Illustrator, and it was sent to the folks at the Wax Seal Shop. The seal-effect here is just a mockup in Photoshop.

Save the Dates put together in Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3 and printed with an Epson Artisan 730 on Coco Linen Ivoire 130gsm.  

Sketch: Village

First sketch in my new sketchbook for 2012. I managed to neatly finish my last sketchbook right at the end of December. ^.^ This would have been finished earlier, therefore, but I was quite busy, and on top of that I've been in bed with a very nasty migraine for the last two days. I am not impressed! Hopefully I'll be getting plenty done this week!

The starting point for this was a photograph my friend's father took of Rastoke in Croatia. It doesn't look like Rastoke any more, although the central buildings and the large bridge are quite heavily influenced by the photograph. After that I just added lots of buildings over the course of a few days. I was fascinated by the concept of a village built pretty much on top of a waterfall. 

0.5 mechanical pencil with #B lead in a Moleskine Sketchbook

Sketch: Building

I really need to practice buildings and perspective. To this end, I've got myself a book on perspective (although I haven't yet had time to do more than flick through it) and I'm making myself draw buildings.

This is the first of the results – from a photo I took on holiday in Georgetown, Penang. I chose it because it had a nice easy front-on perspective to start with.

I didn't draw the whole building – I decided instead on an artistically semi-finished sketch, otherwise known as 'protecting my sanity'. =P

Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, I will have no troubles with perspective, and I'll be able to come up with interesting buildings out of my head. And hopefully I will also have less trouble with furniture in perspective too! ^.^