Here’s the 5min video of me drawing the HP Lovecraft portrait shown HERE.

Today I thought I’d just post a couple of pictures of my drawing board (since I cleaned it up) and the ‘tools of the trade’.

All nice and clean! OK, apart from the ink marks, but they just won’t come out, I’ve tried… trust me!

On the window ledge is my little lamp, I only use it to light a subject in a still life. On the right-hand side of the ledge is my mannequin, it’s only about 10″ tall and really handy for when I need to draw a pose or sometimes I light it with the lamp and do a quick sketch of it for practice. On the board is some A3 paper, to give you  sense of scale… it’s a pretty big board. Top left of it is my masking fluid (white top) ink (black top) then my pencils and ink brushes. Right side of the board is my (homemade) tub of charcoal dust, pencils and charcoal, pastels, pastel pencils then more pastels.

Hey, look, it’s my pencils and what-not! From top to bottom:

• Pipette (for moving ink from bottle to brush pen)
• Masking fluid (for watercolour/ink stuff)
• Black ink
• Sandpaper (for sharpening pastels/pencils/eraser)
• ink pens
• erasers (rubber and kneadable)
• technical pencil
• masking fluid brush
• couple more brushes for blending charcoal/pencil
• ink brush (put ink in the reservoir then effectively paint with it)
• one more ink pen
• (homemade) tortillon for blending charcoal/pencil
• dip pen (for ye olde style inking)
• another blending brush
• another ink pen
• and, last but not least, my battery powered eraser.

Ooh, pastels!

Top left is my tub of charcoal dust, made by rubbing a piece of dark charcoal over my sandpaper and letting the dust fall into the rub, perfect for rubbing in to the paper to give me a neutral tone to start with. Top right is my tin of pencils (the six pencils you see are red, white, charcoal then three graphite pencils) by Derwent. It also has three sticks of graphite (top of the tin) and three stick of charcoal (bottom of the tin). Beside the tin of pencils are some of my pieces of pastel. The thin square sticks are hard pastel, the others are soft pastel. Middle of the photo is my tin of pastel pencils, also by Derwent, these are various colours and are quite hard, good for doing detailed work. Bottom of the photo is some more hard and soft pastels.

So there you go, a quick look behind the scenes of where my pastel and pencil drawings come from!

Today’s painting is a quick watercolour based on a photo of one of my own leopard geckos.

Skull + gas mask = Skull Mask.

Pencil on A4 paper

I have to admit, I rarely make backups. I know, I know, I really should but since I don’t use Windows, I rarely need to worry/reinstall. Contacts and images are the two main things that I mustn’t lose so I keep those safe and sound ‘in the cloud’.

You may have heard the term ‘the cloud’ before. It basically means keeping your data stored on the Internet (as opposed to locally on your computer) where it can be easily retrieved using any computer connected to the Internet. But the key to ‘the cloud’ is that the backup side of things should be transparent. For contacts I use Gmail, and for images I use DropBox. Let me show you how I do it.

I have a Gmail (Google Mail) account, which I rarely use, it’s my backup email address should anything happen to my main email account. Here are my contacts, in Gmail, sorted in to categories:

Whenever I have a contact to add I add it in Gmail not in my email application, you’ll see why in a moment.

Speaking of email application, I use Thunderbird, it’s free and available for both Windows and Linux. With Thunderbird installed, you need to install the add-on called Zindus. This is done by clicking the Tools > Add-ons option (in Thunderbird) then clicking ‘Get Add-ons’ (top left) in the window that pops up. Have it search for Zindus and click the ‘Add to Thunderbird’ button to have it automatically install Zindus. Zindus will hop over to Gmail, grab all your contacts and put them in Thunderbird, effectively synchronizing Thunderbird contacts with your Gmail contacts. Once Zindus is installed, go to the Tools > Zindus menu and add your Gmail account. The only down side of Zindus is that once your contacts are in Thunderbird they won’t be nicely grouped together in categories, but I find this a small price to pay.

So, now my contacts are kept safe and secure in Gmail. Whenever I add a new contact in Gmail it will show up in Thunderbird (above) after the next Zinbus check and if I’m away from Thunderbird I can still access my contacts through Gmail using any web browser on any computer connected to the Internet.

For keeping images safe (or any files for that matter) I use DropBox. DropBox, for free, gives you 2GB of storage space. All you do is go to their site (dropbox.com) and install the DropBox client (again, available on Windows and Linux) on your computer. Once this is done you’ll end up with a folder called DropBox.

Anything you drag in to that DropBox folder will automatically be uploaded to the DropBox site (in the background) and only you can access these files. Should you need to share files with anyone you have a Dropbox/Public folder. To share a file, you simply drag a file to the Public folder, right click on the file, choose Dropbox > Copy Public Link and paste the link in to an email/whatever.

Again, like Gmail, your files are available from any computer connected to the Internet via any web browser (below):

Gmail and DropBox are a great time saver too as sometimes I have a photo that I want to paint, but need the image on my laptop (which is beside my easel in another room), I simply drag the photo to the DropBox folder, head over to my laptop (which also has DropBox installed on it), open DropBox and there it is… no need for USB sticks, network cables and what-not.

TIP: Once you’ve signed up to DropBox you get 2GB of storage space, but for every friend who signs up you get another 250MB of space, so send out invites to all your friends to get more free storage space. I’m up to 3.2GB of free space so far.

One of my older ink drawings (submitted as part of Unit 5) appeared on the London Art College blog!

I finally made front page news!  :D