Saturday routine

As part of "domestic maintenance", Saturday morning includes a trip to the grocery store, not so much for a Big Shop but for an excuse to have breakfast out, at the nearby coffee shop, and to sit there for an hour working on an ipad drawing. Then a wander round Waitrose, remember to get the weekend paper, and quick home before the ice cream melts.

The drawings are mounting up - here are a couple of the newer ones -

Drawing at Kew Gardens

It's not that I'm besotted with drawing on the ipad, it's just that I don't seem to be doing a lot else in the drawing line of things at the moment. And taking the ipad along gives me an excuse, if one is needed, to sit in the warmth and clatter of a cafe with an almost-empty cup of coffee.

On the way to Kew Gardens I tried drawing some "travel-lines" -

Is it the surface of the ipad that's too smooth, or is it the track? Very uninteresting! The thin lines near the top are the result of some experimentation with "dynamic" options ... hoping to overcome the smoothness and get some bumpy interest into the lines.

What works for me is adding in the writing - zooming (spreading?) to 1000% or so means that a chubby finger - and thin line width, 2 or 3 pixels - can write most delicately.

At Kew, unexpectedly torrential rain gave time for more sitting inside and more experimentation - this pot plant on a nearby table was done from scratch - ie, no photo underlying it and "merely" being traced. It's all one layer ... just like drawing on a bit of paper.

oops, suddenly I see there's a bit of stem missing! Also, it might help with balance to make the pot a solid colour -

ipad drawing, Home project

Having taken the photograph at home, I take the ipad to a coffee shop and turn the photo into a drawing -

Each colour is on a separate layer, perhaps to be changed later. What you can't change, but only redraw, is the thickness of the lines.

Adding a filled layer behind everything gives a quite different effect -

Also the colours have all been desaturated, ie made white.

(This post is linked to Off The Wall Fridays. Some background on my ipad drawings and Home project can be found here.)

Extended drawing - small ideas

Last Monday I set out some ideas for "working at home" as there was no class, thanks to a bank holiday. Sorry to say, I've followed up on none of those - but did come up with something different.

Sitting in a coffee shop, to get out of the house and out of the cold weather (temps in low teens, and grey, grey skies all week), I had no book with me to read but did have the ipad. On which were photos of various rooms of the house. I put one into Brushes Redux and started tracing the edges of things -

I had forgotten most what we learned at the "drawing with the ipad" course last year, and stuck with different widths of line and a few colours. Each colour was on a separate layer, as I wanted to try inverting the colours or changing them in some other way. Or maybe making them monochrome.

The drawing and its layers

Layer 4 inverted - the reddish-blue becomes a yellowy-beige

Over the next few days, and in a variety of coffee shops, I did a few more of these drawings -

Tony's computer desk, with view into the garden

The shelf near the sink and its collection of small objects
- which, over 22 years in this house, I'd never looked at closely

Those bird houses

Now the challenge is to get them sized (big? tiny?) and printed out - for some reason the printer feeds the paper right through and says "Paper out" although there's plenty of paper in the feeder. Frustrating or what...

While I've been writing this post, I've done a few of the things on last week's list.

Small, quick drawings of a dozen objects -

They include the wrapped soaps in the bathroom, the stopped clock, various lights, and unread books.

Moving the bird house around and photographing it -

Oddly enough, this did lead to a few half-formed ideas ... something for later perhaps. Ideas about the environment of the dwelling ... about being in the right place. Birds would need the house to be at the right height and away from a human dwelling. (And sometimes it - or the occupant - doesn't fit in - home as non-home.) Also a few thoughts about appropriate adornment. Half-formed and small ideas.

Extended drawing - small ideas

Last Monday I set out some ideas for "working at home" as there was no class, thanks to a bank holiday. Sorry to say, I've followed up on none of those - but did come up with something different.

Sitting in a coffee shop, to get out of the house and out of the cold weather (temps in low teens, and grey, grey skies all week), I had no book with me to read but did have the ipad. On which were photos of various rooms of the house. I put one into Brushes Redux and started tracing the edges of things -

I had forgotten most what we learned at the "drawing with the ipad" course last year, and stuck with different widths of line and a few colours. Each colour was on a separate layer, as I wanted to try inverting the colours or changing them in some other way. Or maybe making them monochrome.

The drawing and its layers

Layer 4 inverted - the reddish-blue becomes a yellowy-beige

Over the next few days, and in a variety of coffee shops, I did a few more of these drawings -

Tony's computer desk, with view into the garden

The shelf near the sink and its collection of small objects
- which, over 22 years in this house, I'd never looked at closely

Those bird houses

Now the challenge is to get them sized (big? tiny?) and printed out - for some reason the printer feeds the paper right through and says "Paper out" although there's plenty of paper in the feeder. Frustrating or what...

While I've been writing this post, I've done a few of the things on last week's list.

Small, quick drawings of a dozen objects -

They include the wrapped soaps in the bathroom, the stopped clock, various lights, and unread books.

Moving the bird house around and photographing it -

Oddly enough, this did lead to a few half-formed ideas ... something for later perhaps. Ideas about the environment of the dwelling ... about being in the right place. Birds would need the house to be at the right height and away from a human dwelling. (And sometimes it - or the occupant - doesn't fit in - home as non-home.) Also a few thoughts about appropriate adornment. Half-formed and small ideas.