Being a fan of 50s/60s kitsch art, have been playing with a contemporary way to create this type of art featuring modern iconic people. Some famous, some not. This is Ida Gyllensten, actress and singer. Drawn in pencil and crayon.
Ida is a friend from wild days in London in the mid-noughties.
Ida is a phenomenal actress. The Guardian said of Ida’s Magdalena in Scandi Noir ‘End of Summer’:
Magdalena is overly protective of her youngest son and cruelly dismisses her daughter. Some of those flashback scenes are beautifully dream-like, before they dissolve into nightmares.
Being a fan of 50s/60s kitsch art, have been playing with a contemporary way to create this type of art featuring modern iconic people. Some famous, some not. More to come.
Playing with some old school print textures, cross hatch and halftone textures. Doing this with human form proved a tricky way to start! Experimenting in this way helps with keeping your ways of looking and style evolving.
I’ve been using an iPad and Procreate for sketch practice. Procreate takes a little time to learn and at first seems overwhelming. I’m a skilled Photoshop user – having spent years doing fashion and archival photo retouch and manipulation – so if you’re starting with Procreate, and have little prior experience, have patience. I’ve followed some great tutorials. However, the drawing and painting techniques all seem a bit alien to me – and not my way of drawing. Because I’ve now got the hang of the basics, I decided to take the iPad out and use like a ‘real’ sketch pad. My friend was swimming at Diver’s Cove today, so whilst keeping an eye on the dog from the shore, I had a bash at drawing this beautiful location. I’ve mainly used colour pencils and conté crayons for this – and it felt natural and familiar, as if I was using real paper. It’s a great feeling to be able to just sketch with a studio full of materials, all compressed down into an iPad!
More importantly, it’s not analogue vs digital art. It’s simply about making art at all – and not having artificial blockers. I was telling myself: ‘I don’t have paper’, or ‘I don’t have a pen’, or ‘I don’t have an easel’ – everything was blocking me. The iPad and Apple Pencil just got me started again without blockers. I’m practicing again, I’m drawing again and I feel better for it – it’s an essential thing for me to be drawing – often.
Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” – Andy Warhol
I love painting, but I’ve never felt natural at it. It makes me feel like I’m swimming with flippers and a snorkel on (and likely taking in water). Give me a pencil, Biro or twig for that matter and it’s easy to draw as breathing – just feels natural to me.
My absolute favourite way of drawing is like this, on coloured paper with a simple black and white pencil. This one has a little medium terracotta chinagraph for warmth.
Inspired by modernist sculpture – especially art deco statures from the 1920s. I saw a load recently in an antique market. It just shows how just looking at things can inspire you without you realising.
I’ve used photos as reference, obviously – I don’t have Hayley Atwell on speed dial.
I’ve been finding my portrait drawings not being as good as I want. It’s good to practice things like hands too, but I’m going back to basics with faces and heads. I’ve been studying how favourite artists approach the head. This includes Loomis method – an idealised way used for commercial and comic art. It’s quite magical following this method and seeing pretty accurate 3D heads and faces appear very quickly. Even better, it can be used for real people, to set up a life drawing or portrait sitting quickly and getting a face likeness.
Anyway, I realised I don’t have a systematic way to do portraits and generally just battle with the paint until the face looks OK. Starting fresh, I’m learning about approaches to structure, and in this example, working skin tones. It’s not my best portrait, but I was mainly following a skin tones technique tutorial. I find it useful to practice from well known people as you can find a range of images from different angles to help with understanding the 3D aspects of the face. This is ALWAYS second best to a real life sitting, but good enough for practice.