Valentine Vector

One of my current forms of meditation is creating vector drawings using the iDraw app on my iPad. I can loose myself in the intricate and minute details of getting a line, fill or curve just right. Hours can fly by just like that. I believe it's called flow (according to a Hungarian chap with no vowels in his name - Mihály Csíkszentmihályi - i spy a vowel or two Awa Rich! It was for comic effect! Jeez, people are so literal these days!).

I'm working on a postcard at the moment, and learning a lot about how to bend this odd medium to my vision. Stay tuned for the result.

Last week I traced the Celtic Valentine. I've been meaning to do it since I drew it (I'm a poet and I didn't know it). It was quite a puzzling challenge, it took all day but I was pleased with the result.

The Putney School of Art and Design summer exhibition is on at the moment and I've entered a medley of vector drawings as I'm being encouraged to do more of these. I don't know if that's because Carolyn and Zehra think they have some merit or because I finish them.

There's a hint at the postcard in the bottom right.

Celtic Hearts Entwined

I finished the Celtic Valentine card in a bit of a rush - like, while I was making the first cuppa on the morning of Valentine's day. I was reasonably pleased with it but the longer I looked at it the less happy I was.

So I started again.

Watercolour and coloured pencil on Fabriano Classico .5 HP 140lb. watercolour paper

Happy now Awa Rich?

Yeah, well, y'know... Get'n there.

Celtic Hearts

Last week's brief at the Putney School of Art and Design Illustration class was to create a bookmark or a Valentine's card.

Several people produced Valentines bookmarks so I was not being original. I removed some bits after the show and tell session as the general opinion was that they were unnecessary. I had to agree.

I was going to do more to it but this morning I decided it was done. There are more ideas germinating from this project.

There always are Awa Rich. Thing is to do summink about 'em!

Can you see 6 hearts?

(Watercolour and coloured pencil on 200gsm cartridge paper)

Knot Again

In a previous post - Get Knotted - I worked out a design for a Celtic cross, used an iPad app to check that it worked and noticed that I could get the design to interlock by slightly overlapping the four units. Using the iPad saved me a lot of drawing, allowed me to mess around with the design, giving me the insight that I could overlap the units.

Int that what puters are for Awa Rich?

The next step was to figure out how to do this with traditional instruments. I'd worked out how to construct a unit in the 'Large Hadron Collider' schematic.

The 'Large Hadron Collider' Schematic

Now all I had to do was repeat the process three more times. This was filling me with some trepidation due to the amount of chaos on the page caused by all the construction lines - which would need a lot of scrubbing out later.

I thought about cutting a cardboard template but that would take some doing and add another layer of inaccuracy. There had to be a way to simplify the construction using only the instruments you can see in the photo. Even so, I'm using technology that wasn't available to 9th century monks - nope, I'm not talking about the iPad - pencils, erasers and paper didn't become available until centuries later.

That's when the holes made by the compass point shone out like a little constellation - you can see I've circled them in the drawing so I could easily find them if I needed to redraw any lines. I already had my template, all I had to do was lay the drawing over a clean sheet of paper and prick through the holes to transfer them to the new sheet, then draw the arcs with the compasses. Rotate the template through 90 degrees and repeat. This proved to be a bit of a faff, it might have been easier to line up the dots if I'd used tracing paper.

It was rotating the template about the central hole that provided the next insight. I remembered technical drawing classes at school, how we were taught how to transfer measurements from one drawing to another using a pair of compasses. This method turned out to be a lot simpler and a clear pattern emerged.

It's amazing how something that seems horribly complicated at first, suddenly simplifies itself if you keep your eyes and brain open. Patterns reveal themselves like magic.

Sometimes you have to go the long way round to discover the shortcut Awa Rich!

Hmm, most sagely. I must write that one down.

Once the positions of the compass points were transferred using the compasses, it was a simple matter of drawing the arcs.

Another insight. I've been referring to each quarter of the drawing as a unit since the whole thing is the same pattern repeated four times rotated through 90 degrees. But notice that each arm of the cross is symmetrical about a line through the centre of the pattern. What I've been thinking of as a unit is actually two smaller units reflected about that line. The cake has 8 slices, not 4.

This reminded me of tedious, dry maths classes at school. Transformations - displacement, rotation, reflection and scaling - and here I was having fun with them.

Symmetry

This post is about a journey. Ideas, patterns, problems and insights that provided solutions - so no explanation of the step by step process is included. I'll do that another time.

Now all I have to do is colour it in.

Get knotted

I was reading in The Book of The Book of Kells the other day what tools the monks would have used to create the designs. It was all simple stuff, compasses, straight edges, French curves, quill pens, brushes and pointed sticks.

All the designs I've drawn so far have all been free hand. So I decided to have a go at a more accurate drawing. I don't have George Bain's book (note to self: must get hold of a copy) so I had to work it out from scratch.

And there was much scratching Awa Rich, you musv rubbed that rubber away.

It took me most of the day trying things out and scratching my head, making adjustments or starting again. This is the result, though it might be a schematic for part of the Large Hadron Collider.

These are the sketches I did earlier. You can see the scrap of paper I drew them on in the photo above.

I photographed them with the iPad, cropped them and then opened them in the Autodesk Sketchbook Pro app.

The small sketches are units for a larger design so I duplicated the layer containing the unit, rotated and moved each layer and filled in the gaps on a new layer to make the design below. It's a bit messy but it was only a proof of concept.

You'll soon be fluent in WaffleSpeak and BizzyBabble if you keep this up Awa Rich.

That seemed to work, so I did a slightly neater version.

I noticed that if I overlapped the points of the heart/pretzel shaped part I could interlock the whole design.

And here's the same thing using the design drawn with instruments.

(I seem to have acquired another keyboard dyslexia tick, there is no h in desighn as there is no u in Yourkshire).

No there int Awa Rich, you vact your wayt out of there to London.

Stay tuned for the finished version. That'll take me another couple of days. No wonder it took so long to create The Book of Kells.

By the way. Last night, while Marie was out with her office comrades at a swanky restaurant, I watched The Secret of Kells again - a brilliant animated story about the origin of The Book (that turns darkness into light!)

It's a dramatisation of the known facts and a ripping yarn. Watch it for the story, the design, the shapes (you'll see what I mean when you watch it) the illustration, the backgrounds, the music, the characters, the magic, the mythology, the jokes, the cat and the messages both hidden and explicit.

Stay with it as the end titles roll for a wee treat as the late Mick Lally (the voice of Brother Aidan) recites the poem Pangur Bán - in Gaelic, written by an Irish monk in the 9th century about his cat.

Get hold of a copy, it'll restore your faith in 2D animation. Suitable for children of all ages. The wolves and the Vikings are pretty scary though, but all is well in the end.

Knot So Fast Buster!

A good place to start telling a story is in the middle. I put this Celtic knot picture in a previous post as an example of a drawing I'd made using the 53 Paper app. on my iPad. It started as a doodle, a warm-up for some other sketches in a proper paper sketchbook, but I reworked it after drawing more of the same with pencils, coloured pencils and watercolour.

Decisions I made while using physical media influencing decisions about the digital image. Using the eraser a lot - much easier in the digital context, though in the 53 Paper app. there is only a hard eraser whereas a real eraser can be more subtle. Real paper can only withstand a certain amount of scrubbing but a digital eraser can rub out as many times as you like.

I like the effect of layering colours you get with coloured pencils, the way you can see the granular texture of the colours in the previous layers. I tried it in the digital image and achieved a fair approximation. A pleasant effect, better than flat colour. Using the pencil tool to draw the thick outlines was useful as I could over draw lines to make them stronger or ease back on others - more like a real pencil and less digital looking than using the pen or marker tool to give a solid line.

Overlaying watercolour glazes creates some interesting effects but nothing like real watercolour.

Here's a page from my sketchbook with the same design drawn with non photo blue pencil - to establish the design - overdrawn with a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil then coloured with Derwent Studio coloured pencils.

The design below has been outlined with black ink.

Finally, a more worked up version done with a combination of watercolour and coloured pencil on Fabriano Accademia Desegno e Acquarello 240 gsm natural grain paper - which is very absorbent for a paper that declares itself suitable for watercolour, though you can achieve some interesting effects once you get used to it.

The absorbency of the paper exaggerates the way watercolours dry lighter than they appear when they're wet. Some colours appear very dark when wet but almost disappear when they dry.

So, how did I get here? I was marvelling at The Book of Kells on my iPad - get it in the AppStore for the price of an average bottle of wine, you'll be enjoying it long after the wine has gone.

You should go into advertising copywriting - back in the '50s Awa Rich!

I was wondering where you'd got to.

Same here Awa Rich. I was beginning to think you'd abandoned me.

I've been fascinated by Celtic knotwork since I was a kid. My brother Nick and I went through a phase of filling any available piece of paper with intricate designs we called 'creepers' like the tendrils on a pea vine. We'd discovered fractal self similarity, though we didn't know it at the time.

A prize with no bells on it for you Awa Rich!

This made for fertile ground when I got a book about the Vikings from a 'book of the month club'. It had some knotwork design on the cover and/or there were photographs of wood or stone carvings inside. This is all fogged by the passage of time.

That's my version of the story. Nick might remember it differently.

It was Nick that took knotwork as his own thing, beginning with the dust jacket of the Vikings book. The original must have been pretty boring as he replaced it with his own design. From then on, any available surface was fair game. Take a look at his website, there's a link over there on the right.

The design in the image at the top of this post was copied from a small pendant on a troll in a Brian Froud illustration.

All this because I was scratching around some designs for a logo or monogram for my sketchbooks. Actually, a seal to replace the bead on the end of the bookmark ribbon.

Is that the future feature Awa Rich?

One of them, yes.

Messing around with Paper (digital)

I was rummaging around in my drawers - as you do - and came across a pack of Milliput (epoxy putty) and wondered if it was still useable or had it set solid?

Milliput alway reminds me of the sticks of gelignite used by bank robbers in old American black and white gangster movies, I cut a slice from each of the sticks and kneaded them together like a good Peterman (that would be a safe blower Awa Rich) and it was still good. I couldn't resist making a head from the marble sized ball that resulted - having no leaks to fix or cracks to plug.

The face of this creature put me in mind of Pierrot the clown, so I snuffled around on the Googles for some pictures. Seems I'm not the only one who finds all those Comedia del Arte characters a bit creepy. There was a stunning photograph by a young Swedish art student of a doll, but shot so that it looked like a person. Very beautiful but faintly disturbing. Clowns and dolls, guaranteed to give me the collywobbles. It must have been all those black and white Hammer Horror films I watched in the '60s.

That led me on to drawing on my iPad with the 53 Paper app, probably the simplest graphics app available - limitation being the muse of creativity and all that. Drawing on a computer or iPad with a stylus is a lot more difficult than using the real deal - pencil and paper - but, as with everything, practice makes pretty good. Plus, I find that the different experiences of using a computer and physical materials produce inspirational flashes that have me zipping back and forth between the computer and my drawing table to try out what I've just discovered. Try this at home!

Them would be those transferrable skills you used to teach to YTS trainees Awa Rich.

Indeed.

I'd been monkeying about with some very basic Celtic knots - for reasons I'll explain later - but wasn't too happy with the drawing on the iPad, so I had another crack at it and was more satisfied with the result. Drawing on the iPad is a good warm-up exercise.

I was thinking about some little characters for a story I'll tell you about sometime and was leafing through a book of Swedish Folk Tales illustrated by John Bauer (are you listening Brian Froud?) After a few abortive attempts at getting the look I wanted, I erased the page and started on a drawing for the Pierrot character inspired by the strangely beautiful doll photo.

I'll show you the model when it's finished.