I have been preoccupied with the sale of our house and the purchase of a new one, which has more room for art studios and space for art materials. The new house is located in a small town in the country, there are forests and mountains withing a few hundred metres of the front door, so lots of inspirational sources on the doorstep.
The burning World
I developed a watercolour from the earlier pencil drawing of the topic. This is an A3 size painting rendered with W&N Cotman watercolours.
Keeping my eye in
After completing the watercolour, the distraction of moving has prevented me from undertaking any new projects. I have spent some time drawing on A4 scrap paper. Inspired by some images of motorbikes I saw on DeviantArt, I tried my hand at something. I tried drawing a bike and rider using a small plastic kit I have. A week later I had another 'go' without any reference material to 'prop me up'. The profile drawing below is the result.
The technology of motorbikes is not an area I am familiar with so perhaps a better result would have been forthcoming with a posed model or photograph. However, my aim is to create not copy, so this was intended as a start.
A week later I did a few more drawings of human heads, again with no reference material. Then, tired of packing stuff in boxes for the move, I took time out to try a figure drawing to see if the teaching of Paul Birchall had sunk in or evaporated. I think the image below indicates something has sunk in, though there is room for improvement - always :-)
I was reading an article in imagineFX by Keith Gurney on the topic of composition. Keith suggests that the starting point of a drawing or image is the idea you are trying to communicate, one then works from that central idea outwards to create the image and its context. In this example I am still mucking about with anatomy issues, once they are resolved perhaps I can do more with this image or its descendants.
