drawosaur: drawings in colour

Showing posts with label drawings in colour. Show all posts

Friday, 3 August 2012

Cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park

I used two images for reference here. I found a picture of codebreakers busy at work, and the layout of their desk reminded me of an Evelyn Dunbar picture, which has a much more interesting composition. So I tipped up the perspective and painted it this way as a tribute.

There seem to be very few photos of Bletchley Park around -- for obvious reasons -- and the ones that exist look quite staid and unexciting. I suppose if an official government photographer was there, everyone would be on their best behaviour. The written stories and sketches are far more vivid and full of life and humour. I think photographs aren't going to be much use to me for this section. I'm also aware that I should make some more dynamic 'action' pictures, which might be tricky for BP because it was mostly people sitting around doing office work, or standing monitoring big machines... and I'm aware that if I only illustrate the more colourful incidents, that would give quite the wrong idea about the place. I need to try to strike a balance between interesting and correct.

Cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park

Evelyn Dunbar, 'An Army Tailor and an ATS Tailoress' (1943)

Wednesday, 1 August 2012

Trench Kids

watercoloured

pencil under-drawing

Children sheltering in a trench during the Battle of Britain over
the hop fields of Kent, 1940. Photo by John Topham

It's so many years since I used watercolours, I felt a bit apprehensive, but I think this has come out all right.

- The blue of the middle boy's jumper was far too strong and knocked everything else out of balance, but I've toned it down a bit with glazes of white. I'm looking forward to doing loads more pictures because by the end of it I'll probably be much more confident with both watercolour paint and using colour.

- I thought the drawing looked a little bit manga, a bit Studio Ghibli in the faces, but it looks less so now that there's colour.

- This is on cold-pressed paper (the difference between cold-pressed and hot-pressed paper). The painted areas look nicer and the pebbly texture is appropriate for the dug earth. But I think if I'm working in fine detail, it would be better to do most of my work on smooth hot-pressed paper.

- What to do about the lines?! I'm wondering whether to go over all the lines with black ink. I like the delicate quality to the image as it is, but I'm worried that the forms are getting a bit lost. I have a good command of line, I'm much better at line than colour. Some of my favourite illustrators like Janet Ahlberg, Axel Scheffler and Helen Oxenbury would go over it in ink. But the problem with ink is that once it's done, it's done; no going back. I could spend a whole day on a picture, put on black lines and then realise it's wrecked. So I think I'm going to do a few more watercolours first and then decide whether overall, as a group, they'd look better with ink.

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

Star-Crossed Traffic Cones

(Adapted from a photo by @TheFagCasanova.)

Monday, 17 January 2011

Bike Horse

Drawn for the blog Horse with Hands Riding a Bike.

Thursday, 6 May 2010

#drawagiraffe

A quick drawing for @mixmasterfestus's #drawagiraffe project.

Friday, 25 December 2009

Advent Calendar: Behind the Scenes Special!

I thought it would be fun to show you how one of these drawings comes together. Remember that if you click on the images, you can see them at 700x510.

I start by sketching out the scene lightly in pencil (darkened here to make it show up).

Then I draw over the pencil with a fineliner -- this is about half-done.

Here I've finished drawing the ink lines and rubbed out the pencil marks.

Next I fill in the first layer of coloured pencil, the main blocks of colour.

The shading and details are done with more pressure, so the colours start to darken.

Finally, I edit the image in Photoshop, cropping the image, making the colours richer and tweaking some fiddly details.

Spot the Difference! In this picture, a mistake with the Tyrannosaurus' leg needed erasing; the Torosaurus' markings were cut and pasted from the 18/12/09 drawing of him so they'd be identical; a bit of brown leg that encroached on the yellow glow was snipped out; and I added some shading to the haybale.

The development would probably be much easier to see if I posted an animated .gif, but I don't know how to make those, so I hope this post explains it well enough.