Starting the new year 2021

It’s the last day of 2020, I completed another drawing in my exercise series, an A4 rendition of a South African Railways Class 15F steam locomotive.

SAR class 15F steam locomotive

The drawing is based on a photograph I took in about 1982 somewhere near Johannesburg. I am told these were the mainstay of the South African Railways for many years. The original photograph was taken on slide film with a Canon A1 camera and 50mm lens.

South African Railways class 15F steam locomotive

Drawing process

My approach to these drawings has been to use a device called a ‘scale finder’. It’s a transparent plastic with a grid on it. I place it over the original photograph and tape it in place. Then calculate how many squares of the image I want to use in my composition. I then draw that many squares on the A4 page thus automatically creating the new scale. For most of the works to date where I have used this approach it has been quite easy to map details onto the page.

Scale finder with photograph and A4 drawing

 

When I started work on this locomotive I began to realize that the detail was too fine for my eyesight and too fine to be scaled up with any degree of accuracy. It did not help that my lack of familiarity with the subject meant I had no idea what the objects were that I was trying to represent, nor how the related to one another.

Eventually I put the image into a laptop perched on my drawing table. Then as I worked across the image putting in details, I could zoom in and see what exactly it was I was drawing. This approach helped a great deal, but it has one drawback. I found that drawing from a larger image created a tendency for me to draw the item being observed larger than the scale required.

What this particular exercise brings home to me is that observation is critical. It’s important to recognise shapes and the negative shapes around them. However, it is also important to understand how things are connected up to other parts of the object or structure being drawn.

Creating depth and perspective

To render this drawing I first used the scale finder to work an overall outline and position salient points on the paper. After that I started adding details and shading, starting from the left of the paper (I am right handed).

The challenge with this drawing was to give the impression of perspective. I used two approaches to do this, contrast variations and detail variations. 

Contrast variation

The first was to reduce the tonal contrast as the drawing progressed from left to right. I made more use of soft pencils, 6B and 8B for shadows at the front of the engine, whereas towards the rear I restricted my efforts to 4B. Light areas and items at the front of the train where appropriate were left as white, or brought back towards white with the putty rubber. Shiny pale items near the rear of the engine were shaded with the 2B pencil to reduce contrast. 

Detail variation

Just as with the contrast variation so I used the same strategy with the level of detail provided. Towards the rear of the engine, I was less concerned with detailing all the features and getting it accurate. What this does is increases the effort the viewer has to make to fill in the image. The front part tells them what it is and their imagination tells them there is a whole steam engine there but its less clear because its further away. 

Ian Revealed - an introduction

Who am I?

I have always practiced art in some form since I can remember. My mother was keen, and throughout her life provided me with art material. This came as gifts of watercolour paper, paints, inks, and books on the subject. Whilst in the last few decades of my working life I attended a variety of art teachers’ studios once a week in an evening after work. Over years of such practice I built up a collection of artworks that in my view developed in quality. At the end of 2019 I was retired from work because of my age – 66 years old! Out to pasture! Well except for my numerous other interests, geology and palaeontology, aviation history and the construction of plastic model aircraft, photography, and of course art!

Why a Blog?

An interesting question, that reaches deep into ones motivation and internal drivers. It’s the thing to do perhaps! It offers fame perhaps! Or maybe more realistically it’s a marketing tool on the internet to promote my work.

I already publish material as it reaches completion on my personal ‘Facebook’ page for friends to comment on, and I hope to enjoy and be entertained. I also publish completed works on my account at Deviant Art, a web site for artists. See https://www.deviantart.com/ianrevealed/gallery

I also post ideas and stages of work on an interactive forum in Wet Canvas. There I receive technical advice on aviation and art, as well as that important encouragement from other like minded artists.

What sort of art do I do?

My art is representational. I have read or skimmed a considerable number of books on art history and genres of art. Out of that has come a realization that I like to represent the physical world in a plainly understandable way. My style is a loose form of realism or impressionism, at least with my oil paintings. I also like to draw and work in watercolour.

Some examples of recent work

Below are an example of a recent oil painting, a recent watercolour, and a recent pencil drawing. Each comes with its own explanation and discussion.

Pencil drawing of a museum aircraft

The drawing below is on A4 paper, rendered using ‘Staedtler Mars Lumograph’ pencils. It is one of a series of exercises where I translate an image from a photographic print onto paper, reducing it from full colour to monochrome.

Hendon museum - B-17 Flying Fortress

The drawing was an interesting exercise; its primary aim was to learn to translate images from one scale to anther using a grid, and also to translate a colour image into a pure tone image. With this particular subject I also found that one has to pay particular attention to the negative shapes in the form and also understand the 3D shapes of the form being represented. It was quite demanding from the point of view of concentration.

The drawing is one of a series intended to create a habit of doing a ‘bit of art’ each day. I have found with retirement, life is easy to let pass by whilst one muses and dabbles in various interesting things. The problem is at the end of a year one is left with a feeling of agitation at not achieving anything!

Watercolour of an MG TD at Cape Town Castle

This was produced as part of my learning to do art each day activity. I had a photograph of the MG from a time when my wife was a member of the relevant club and went on outings to drive these cars. I am not sure who this one belongs to. The best bit of the painting process for me, was towards the end when I painted the bright-work, front lights and grille.

Watercolour - MG TD at Cape Town castle

The format is 21 X 30 centimetre 200gsm mixed media ‘Amedeo’ paper by Pro-Art. The paints were W&N Cotman colours.

Oil painting of an Anhinga ‘Darter’ (Anhinga rufa)

Living in Africa provides opportunities to approach wildlife with relative ease. Several years ago whilst paddling a canoe down a river in the South of the Continent we came upon an Anhinga drying its wings. It was on a branch at water level and we approached to about four feet without any apparent alarm to the bird. The close quarters photographs were used to create this painting.

Anhinga drying its wings - Oil on canvas board

The painting took several months starting with drawings, a paper model, and then a rough painting prior to the final work presented here. The painting is on W&N 20 X 16 inch artists canvas board. The paint is W&N Artisan water mixable oils.