ONLINE ART COURSE – COMPLETING THE OLD CAR PROJECT, AND A DRAWING OF LILY AND RUBY

At last we have finished the first main project of the Ink Pens module. Both my hubby and I have been pretty busy lately and it’s been hard to find time when we could both sit down together to work on this drawing.

Here is my completed drawing.

The reference photo, and Phil’s instructions, included a background of further old wrecks of cars, and it was quite dark, throwing forward the main focus of the drawing, the old Plymouth. My hubby included this, but from the outset I wasn’t keen as I thought the photo was all a bit busy and somewhat claustrophobic, and also quite dark. I wanted my old car to stand alone. It was fun to compare our finished drawings – our style is very different, and the presence or absence of the background made quite a difference.

For me, leaving out the background meant that there was very little work to do on the final stage. I added the grasses in front of the car and darkened the area under the wheel arch with further watercolour, and extended the watercolour wash up the left side of the picture a little, and added some more grasses there. All in all, I am pretty pleased with how it looks.

I have made a montage of the five photos I took, of each stage of the drawing, to show how it came together.

You can see that there isn’t a great deal of difference between Steps 5 and 6 in my version.

This has been a really fun project to do. I still feel sad that this magnificent old car, which must once have been someone’s pride and joy, should be mouldering away in some junk yard. I always love to see these old cars beautifully and lovingly restored by their enthusiast owners, and proudly driven to rallies. Modern cars simply don’t have the character of these glorious vehicles of bygone days.

A drawing of Lily and Ruby

I drew this picture from a photo I took back in the spring of 2020, in the middle of the lockdown, and I called it “A Lesson in Social Distancing.” This is the original photo – they were going through one of their funny little phases at that time, of completely monopolising the current favourite place, in this case my box of yarns. This large banana box was filled with yarn cones and a thick paper covering, and it cannot have been very comfortable to lie on, but they loved it – until one day they didn’t, for some reason, and moved on to pastures new. We have a saying in our household: “There’s no accounting for kitties.”

I edited the photo to make it more acceptable for a drawing. I rotated it and then desaturated it so that I had a black and white image. I also created a posterised version of this, with only three values – black, white and grey, so that I could see at a glance where the darkest and lightest values were, and one intermediate grey.

I began by mapping out the outlines and some salient points in pencil, using my proportinal divider, which really does help with the proportions and angles. The initial drawing is the hardest part for me – I find it so hard to get the proportions right and don’t realise until it’s too late… This useful little tool helps no end.

After this, referring to the posterised image, I blocked in some black watercolour. At this stage it looked a bit of a mess, but this is apparently normal, and it would soon get tidied up with the ink work.

Finally, once it was dry, I was able to add the details with my Staedtler fine liner pens. This is the result.

Initially, I was going to paint in the box, but changed my mind. I had already added the dark strip on the left which was a bit of a problem, and I had to blend it out as much as possible, and in the process I was able to add further washes around the outside of the drawing.

Once it was fully dry, I added some touches with the white pen – the whiskers, and picking out some white fur and small highlights. A bit of fiddling with both white and black pens, and it was done.

In addition to removing the box, I made one or two more alterations, the most obvious being that I closed Lily’e eyes. She was not quite asleep in the reference photo so I closed her eyes, and I think the effect is better.

This is one of my all-time favourite photos of the kitties, and I am very happy to have been able to draw it.