Recently I have been playing with drawing digitally for some projects that I have in the back of my mind.
I have so many ideas that I want to put out there but I have to focus.so drawing digitally is one of the things I do in the evening in front of the television with my wife.
I have to admit it feels very different to drawing on paper and painting with watercolours so I have a long way to go to find my ideal workflow in the medium. Even with an apple pencil there is a big disconnect.
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Origami Water Bomb
Or how I caused trouble in high school
When I was in high school or at least my last two years of high school, I was fed up, didn’t feel like I was making any progress, so I started entertaining myself in classes by making origami models. The thing is the only one I had actually memorised from my older brothers book was for a “water bomb”.
They wouldn’t that effective for holding water, as generally filling them from a tap, water would spill all over them as the hole was so small. they would just end up soggy.
So what I did instead was make them to all different sizes and colours, and with any paper I could get my hands on, even tiny little ones smaller than a centimetre cube that I built with the assistance of a pair of compasses. I would then hide them with my co-conspirators in classrooms to be discovered when we weren’t there.
No one ever questioned me about it, and having worked in education I can only imagine that they weren’t bothered as at the end of the day a lot of stuff just gets swept into the bin.
This water bomb is drawn on A4 Cartridge Paper and drawn in pencil crayon.
Today is a lazy Sunday, I’m sitting with my family we have Netflix on in the background, and I am thinking about the last eighteen months since I started working on being a painter as well as a potter. It has been a journey of exploration, of finding myself. Though I have been drawing every day for the last six years, it wasn’t until I started this as a business that I really considered what it was I actually liked to draw, I just drew.
somedays I drew what was on my desk, from life fruit, jars, tins, packets just everything and anything. one day I realised I wanted to draw landscapes and buildings, so I started to work from my own collection of photographs.
A view I had never seen before in Fleetwood.
As part of Tram Sunday (Fleetwood festival of transport 2022), I went out with my camera in hand and started taking pictures of the festival but also bits of buildings and found an alleyway that I have never noticed before bear the market, and as plenty of people were walking around the town with cameras I didn’t feel weird as I had done before and I really love the alleyway as an image. There is so much going on from rendered walls some with iron oxide drips, the weeds growing, the cobblestone wall which morphs into a brick wall, and the random little lamppost ties it all together in a nice neat vertical element.
When I wanted to explore further afield I didn’t have the time to really travel, so I started using google street view to travel. I still use it at times but I don’t use it completely in my drawings, I use it as a jumping point, imagining the buildings from a different angle, a different perspective.
I want to keep exploring, keep developing my skills, keep painting and move further afield than I currently can. I also would really like to experiment with woodblock printing, recently as part of my super secret project I did some printing off of some driftwood I have collected over the years and I really want to play about with that some more.
Is May and as I write this the new Obi Wan Kenobi series has been released and I am excited to watch it, and am staying away from social media until I have had chance to watch it with my other half after she gets home from work this evening.
Star Wars was a pivotal point in my teenage years it made me want to draw, to paint, for many years it was my passion, it is my teenage drawings that going me accepted to many different courses after I initially went to university to study chemistry.
I still want to be good at drawing and painting to live up to those teenage dreams of working on a Star Wars film. I want to keep painting.
Even when I was doing a degree in ceramics I would write about painters, I would go on trips to look at landscape painting and illustration. My jumping point for ceramics was always painting as a frustrated painter, want to be able to draw better and for years I painted and drew and kept it to myself.
I will keep going but it can be hard at times, frustrating but I’m getting better and I will keep painting and drawing.
These two watercolours are probably my favourite Star Wars things I’ve painted this month, and they are available in my shop for sale, Luke’s Landspeeder and Rebel Snowspeeder
I have been drawing now for self improvement for the last decade and a half. I dabbled with drawing as a teenager, as most do. I even dreamed of working on Star Wars up at Lucas Film. The only issue was I was put off by the very formal way of learning at High School, for example this happened in art class:
“this week we are doing cubism… No Joseph you are doing cubism wrong!” ~My Art Teacher
So that was the end of that, I went off to college I did sciences and mathematics and nothing creative in sight. I did well at College and got into a top university, studied hard but kept feeling unfulfilled. I was bored out of my mind so one day when I was supposed to be heading to the lab, I packed a bag with my essentials, got on a train and left that town and travelled back to my home town.
A short walk from my old day job is Cleveleys Cove Cafe, perched right above the sea, the architecture is quite unusual for a local building. At the start of May though it closed for a time as a film crew descended on Cleveleys and dressed the Cafe and the promenade into something from another world.
I am a massive star wars fan and unfortunately due to back pain I didn’t make it down to look at the set in person but I did see plenty of photographs and footage. And I can’t wait for it to be released on Disney+ at some point in the distant future.
