Eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, why drawing birds is like drawing people.

Summer is basically over guys.

Before I go back to schooltimes this week, I wanted to share with you some birds and words and drawings. Some organic work feeding into work sort of stuff. In case you think I only draw comics and cookie cutters these days. 

In the beginnings of the summer I did quite a few bird pieces some of which are still available on Artfinder and I took quite a lot of in progress pictures. 

I had a magpies commission to do and it was a while since I had drawn any, so I did a practice piece of a magpie taking off to the left, which was a lot of fun. Tapping into this territory of planning combined with quick, fluid working is so good - each individual stage is quite loose and quick, but you have to wait for each one to dry so that the ink doesn't just bleed into the lighter areas completely out of control. Like watercolour, using ink is a lot about patience and a lot about balancing chance and control. 

So then I did some more magpies pieces

Ah, good old magpies. 

Also I drew some hypno barn owls. Because. 

 And then, because I had some photos of a swan that I took on a walk along the Regent's Canal, I did this swan piece which is still for sale. 

One thing about drawing birds in sequence like this, (as well as the satisfyingly obtuse combination of regularity and irregularity that reminds us that though we live in a world of mass reproduction there is still infinite variety - yes I am good at arty bullsh*t thank you) is you can include some of the angles/poses of bird that don't really look like what the brain reads as a bird.

Confused? Let me explain. Drawing birds is a lot like drawing portraits. Because 90% of the time, the position a bird is in and the angle you can see it from, don't fit our mental template of bird. The mental template requires either a bird standing still on a branch/wire/post or swimming, with it's head up and in profile so you can see the beak, or a bird in flight with the wings flexed and visible. 

This on it's own, would never be read as a swan

I mean what is that? 

Some fluff? A carelessly ejected dollop of whipped cream? A shaggy baseball cap? 

But in context with their 8 swans a swimming siblings, we can read it as a swan. 

How is that like drawing portraits? Because despite living in the real world and looking at real people all the time, we still are slaves to photo and mirror faces when it comes to considering what those people actually look like. 

Karim

When I teach portraiture I always make sure to emphasise how hard it is to break down our mental conditioning to read a face as a symbol. One of your very first jobs when you are born is to identify fellow humans, to find your tribe you are basically looking for a coordination of eyes and a mouth because that's about as far as your visual processing goes. Which is why we love emojis so much. 

I mean probably, I'm not a scientician. But this makes people who are bad at drawing faces feel better. 

Training yourself to process the visual information of the eyes being half way down the head not up at the top is the first step to de-emojifying your brain. You can do that drawing on the right side of the brain thing and make yourself forget it's a face you're drawing and just look at the shapes. Which is fine if you're drawing from a photo. But problematic if you're drawing a person in real life who moves a bit whatever their intentions. 

Live drawing from July

I actually prefer to draw people from real life because of this. 

The infinite tiny movements your face makes give a wealth more information than any photo could, and so many of us are in the habit of putting on that practised smile as soon as a camera points out way. A smile that's usually nothing like the smile we give when we're genuinely amused, or contented. Not like the bird posed on a wire or wings out and up for a fraction of a second. To capture a real likeness you have to see both - the photo face and the face behind it. The person behind it. 

That's what I think anyway. I do also LOVE drawing faces straight from a photograph. It's not that I don't like that. With the facebook project I mostly have the advantage that I know the person in question in real life, so I can tell which of their facebook photos are good representations of their real life presence, and which are the ones that were chosen as a profile pic because they look more like what we wished we looked like. If I'm doing a portrait for a client I always ask if they can send me multiple photos as well as the one they want me to use as primary reference. So I can check the angle of the features as an average, and make sure I talk to the hind brain of the people that know the real life person I'm drawing. 

With this little guy for example, I had to make sure I got his sleepy eyes and his chubby little neck.

Another recent commission for an editorial illustration in UCL Alumni magazine had me drawing a small brown child, but this time with lots of colourful reflecting water. It was for an article about how over protected today's children are.

One of the joys of art is such that what one draws/makes, one often wants to draw/make more of. Which is why life feeds into practice and practice evolves. So this commission in a way lead to the look of the swan piece, and to me choosing this photo to draw of Julita from her facebook albums. 

I think I've got reflecty water out of my system now. 

But we'll see. 

Maybe I'll think of a way to get some into the comic. 

In black and white too, what a delicious challenge. 

2015 in summation, adventures, makings, illumastrations. PART THREE

The month long gap before this final part was obviously a calculated move, and not because this has been sitting half written while I got distracted by stuff. So I'm going to delay no further, and publish this ridiculously long final instalment.

Wondering what I'm talking about? Parts ONE and TWO of my round up of 2015 are available for preamble and context. 

In August of 2015, I was on holiday from my day job of teaching. That's what they give us in return for babysitting their educationlings for the rest of the year. Time off for good behaviour. It's a thing.

By this time, a lot of stuff had happened on the flat buying front. Over the previous year we'd had offers accepted on 3 different places in Walthamstow, none of which we were fated to purchase. 

Then, against all rational odds, we were offered the chance to buy a half share of a flat in Islington, only 10 minutesish walk from the shoebox we'd been renting for the previous 5 years. There is a government scheme set up to help people to buy in the boroughs in which they live and work, even poor middle class young professionals like us. But obviously without it there is no way we would have been able to do so. It's a bit weird. Like those rent controlled apartments in New York that sitcom protagonists always somehow seem to have acquired, to fit the camera crew in. Possibly we have only been allowed to do this because the government are planning to turn our lives into a sitcom to entertain the masses. I mean. They COULD. We are very witty in private. 

This is the picture of us I drew for The Sunday Comics - it's SUPPOSED to be cheesy. 

Alex did not have a beard at the time. 

So anyway in August, we were QUITE sure that was going to happen (the Islington flat), but not actually sure. Because although it's not technically possible to be gazumped out of a part buy housing association property, our experiences in the 'Stow had left us with very little confidence in property changing hands at all. Ever. But I was packing. Slowly. And making a lot of phonecalls to a number of different people who were juggling obscure pieces of paper about land rights and pushing our potential exchange date further and further back. So it was not a summer without stress. But compared to the one where I was writing my thesis, or the one where I was getting married, it was a walk in a park. 

I drew a lot of comics in August, the cat one above, some new Horay Bear strips for The Sunday Comics, and the final version of the 8 page comic for Friedrich Naumann Stiftung's Fur Die Freiheit, the comic about the hypothetical futures of Europe that I had won the chance to contribute to. 

What you should know about Horay Bear: he is permanently excited. We used to write comics about him for a short-lived web comics platform a long time ago. But in 2016, Horay Bear is BACK. Probably. 

This is some of the Europe Fast Forward comic. More about the competition later. But you can see the whole comic and the other entrants here. 

I drew a bunch of portraits for a party, not live but from photos for a change, including this one of the amazing illustrator Willa Gebbie

I had a reunion adventure in Bournemouth in August too, where I got to hang out with some of the awesome people I studied Illustration with at Southampton Solent. We played a lot of pictionary, and went to the beach. It was really fun.

It was also the year of my Dad's 60th birthday - the same year as my 30th! He is like, twice of me. 

We took him for a lovely adventure day and picnic in Greenwich. 

Here is a photo with BOTH my parents in, from the Cutty Sark, because I already posted a photo of me and Dad in the last segment, and I don't want them to think I'm playing favourites. 

It was really hot that day.

On one of my stints doing live portraits at The Big Chill House, I exhausted the clientèle downstairs and managed to blag my way into the private party upstairs to draw people there. Turns out it was the party of the world famous Architecture firm Heatherwick Studio (you may have heard of the Seed Cathedral, the Olympic Cauldron thing from the London Olympics, or that Garden Bridge that Joanna Lummley is not a fan of). I wish I had a better photo than this of the drawing I did of Thomas Heatherwick.

The lighting was not ideal on the roof bar, 

here are some of his colleagues though.

In September two of my good friends celebrated their unborn children with cake and gifts, which is to say baby showers is a thing now. 

Older people have looked very confused when I tell them this, but if our generation have learnt anything from America, it's to never turn down an opportunity for cake and gifts. 

I made these hand lettered baby grows for the (then, as I said, unborn and so unnamed, but now born and named) little Arthur and Felix.

Arthur.

They proved a big hit, and I now offer them on demand here. 

This is me having successfully put a nappy on Baby Christmas, proving my readiness for being friends with people with babies. Or something. We also played pin the sperm on the egg. 

I was close, but lost points for being outside of the uterus. 

When not angsting about flat prospects, in the weekends of August and September Alex and I had also been going on a lot of long walks. Not just because we are old now, but in training for the longest walk at the night time; The SHINE walk. So on September the 26th we walked 26 miles from 10pm to around 8am around central London on a Marathon route with a bunch of people covered in fairy lights. It was the first time I've ever done something for charity that I actually felt was hard enough to justify me actually asking people to give money to charity. It was really hard. 

But it was really really good. Watching the sun rise over the City as we walked back along the south bank, foot sore and weary and bleary eyed, was pretty awesome. 

The other comic book thing from 2015 came to fruition in September too, the poetry comic I did for the anthology Over the Line. I wrote about it, and about ruminations on the nature of creativity here.

This is the other page, so if you read this and the other post you will have seen both pages. If that makes sense.

In September in addendum, and after what felt like an infinity of phonecalls, paperwork and bureaucracy, we finally completed on our part buy Islington flat purchase, and were even able to do a large amount of the moving over half term. We did not take a photograph posing in the doorway with our new keys. Sorry. We're just not really into that kind of thing. 

Here is a not great photo of us having pizza and prosecco on moving day in the new flat though. Hazel and I look super serious. Because movings is serious business. 

As is prosecco. 

From a few days later with Alex's parent. Apparently we'd lightened up a little. 

We've since acquired a sofa. And unpacked some boxes. 

In October I finished this piece of hand lettered illustration that I’d been working on between paid work for a while:

 

 I used it to make a series of responsibly sourced sketchbooks that you can own if you would like. They’re very cool and also include some hints and drawing challenges, as well as each one being unique and special (just like you).

It was an appropriate time of year for me to release these books, because it was Big Draw time of year again. Since StoryHands is on a bit of a creative hiatus atm, we didn’t organise an event in 2015, but I was involved in few other ones.

I helped run a skyline drawing drop in workshop with Jeanette Barnes at the Drawing the World event at Granary Square by King's Cross. We stood up on the viewing platform all day and got people to explorative drawings of the evolving skyline, it was a lot of fun.

I also helped run a Big Draw event at the school I teach at, St Helen's School in Northwood. We had a large variety of treasure hunt style instruction tickets leading our visitors to explore the grounds of the school in different ways and to bring back their drawings to combine together in a collaborative wall display. People got really involved despite the weather not being perfect, and we had some really creative responses from people of all ages!

I did the first of many name illustrations for Little Carousel Gallery for Sophie, after a comical false start where I wrote Sopie, but happily noticed before adding any of the pictures, details, colours - all related to Sophie's favourite things. To see more of these and think about getting one yourself see here. They are so much fun to do. 

Also in October I did a limited edition screen print for Art Crank, they're all about the bicycles and the printing, I'm all about the drawing and the birds, so this is what came out.
I went to the show and got a really cool t-shirt printed also.

The big trip in October was my jaunt to Brussels to attend the exhibition and awards ceremony for the Europe Fast Forward comic. I did not win the first prize, but my comic is in the book and I met lots of interesting arty and political types. And managed to see a few pretty parts of the city on my way through. I posted the link above to read the whole thing, but here it is again. Some very diverse international responses to the question of what might be the future of europe, and a range of effective art styles too. 

Spot me in the video.

In November I began painting a nursery mural for the aforementioned baby Felix, he is one lucky little man. 

I'll show you the finished pics in a minute in December. 

Meanwhile here's me and mum at the Wellcome Collection, States of Mind yellowbluepink installation by Ann Veronica Janssens,  which was a room full of coloured mist so that you lose your sense of space. 

That was fun.

The November big trip was an adventure to Sheffield, specifically to the lovely suburb of Totley to do some sign painting for the, now recently opened, Teatime Vintage tearoom and gift shop. I had done the logo design for Julie back when she started the business as a vintage crockery and events catering company back in 2010, so now they are moving in to bricks and mortar territory I got to go and stay in her lovely house and do lots of painting in signwriters enamel. 

It was a very lovely adventure, and I am very pleased to have been part of making this lovely little shop come into being. If you are in the area of Sheffield or walking in the Peak District you should pop in for a cream tea. 

Here is work in progress of painting the shop sign:

In December I went back to Katie's house in Dulwich to add leaves to Felix's animaltastic tree mural.

My favourite part is the giraffe's knees. 

So I entered the Christmas period on the back of two large scale painting projects, but had a lot of small scale drawing commissions waiting for me before the tide of yule, including some of these:

Custom colouring pages from photos.

Pet Portraits

Individual Portraits

And Christmas markets featured in my calendar joyfully.

Then...

Christmas and New Years Familyandfriendstimes. 

New year photography by Paul Lismer.

And Finis. 

It was a pretty good year all in. 

Comics, murals, property and adventures. Tune in next this year for more protracted ramblings.