My Grey Period

Sketching Online

Here's an excuse to draw, or at least to doodle: from New York, Danny Gregory sends me a link to a sketch he's started in an online drawing program (it's in it's beta version, or I'd give you it's URL).

Danny (who was about to do a radio interview when he wrote) drew the cup. I added the sketchbook, which was on the desk beside me, and mailed it back to him. I drew using my Wacom graphics pad. As you can see, I find it more difficult to control the line that I do when I'm using a coventional pen.

Scary Self-portrait

This afternoon I've just re-charged the digital camera and I'm heading for the kettle when I decide that I'll take a clever self-portrait using the mirror by the back door while the tea brews. This doesn't work - the flash is reflected straight back at the camera - so I hold it at arm's length and click the shutter: I look like an old grey rabbit caught in the car headlights.

In photographs I always look tired, grey and goggle eyed. The photograph itself is TOO horrible for publication so here's an artist's impression of what I looked like on the camera's LCD screen. Again I used the graphics pad to draw it. There is a fascination in using the drawing pad, but I'm unlikely to abandon my pen.

I send this to a friend in whose judgement I trust and she reassures me I don't look like a rabbit at all: 'What a funny and also sad picture. Hope you will never look like that.'

That's what friends are for.

My Right Side

Here's a more serious attempt at a portrait which was drawn on the 10th July this year as one of the excercises in Betty Edward's Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain. Students are asked to briefly write what they think of their portrait on the back of the sheet. The idea is to compare their efforts with a second portrait drawn at the end of the course.

Here's what I wrote:

I felt I looked tired and heavy around the eyes but tried to draw what I could see. I was aware that when I looked from eye to eye my eyes moved so the two eyes don't quite match in the direction they're looking. Despite my frowning I think it looks as if I'm concentrating on drawing, rather than looking angry.

I never finished the Right Side drawing course. I got as far as the blind contour drawing, which requires 20 or 30 minutes of uninterupted concentration, which I couldn't find for myself just then, and never got any further. But I intend to go back and pick up the course at the point I left off, when things settle down . . .

Spiral Stair #2

I go back to the project I started yesterday in my 3D landscapes program Vue 3. My idea is to have a contrast between moonlight outdoors and some dramatic lighting indoors. In Vue it's easy to insert lights: I put a spotlight at the bottom of the stairs, another around the corner at the top and a point source of light in the first window, to look like a candle in an alcove.