On Friday I made an important discovery. Cows, of the type you see in English pastoral paintings, are bath-shaped.
See? Totally bath-shaped, just with hooves instead of clawfeet. I came upon this anatomical curiosity when I was doing some doodling and managed to produce two future design classics: the bull bath and duck curtains.
On an innovation roll, I then drew one of my belts as a snake.
One of the things that made the beltsnake a bit tough to draw was having to connect up the overlapping loops. You have to leave one for a while, go away and draw the bit on the other side, and hope that when it’s done it all looks like a continuous strip of leather. It all worked out fine there, but I found the same going-away-and-coming-back thing harder on Saturday’s drawing.
This is the top of my folded umbrella. I liked it for its blossomy-ness and decided to try drawing it. Because of all the loops of fabric, I had the same challenge as the belt – drawing interconnecting bits at different points in the process and have it look like like a coherant whole. It’s not that successful, but I think it gets better the further out from the centre you get. The left and the top manage to get a bit of texture. I have to admit, though, that there are a bunch of little curls around the core bit of plastic that I’ve totally missed out here. Oops. Have a look at the top of an umbrella sometime though. It’s pretty cool.
The sign outside Fran’s on College Street in Toronto. It’s a brilliant diner. If you’re in Toronto you should go there and get breakfast. Now! It’s open 24 hours. Glenn Gould used to go there every day, but of course you knew that.
A friend and I went to Fran’s when we were in Toronto, so this one’s for him.
A friend of mine overheard a girl in Soho the other day saying into her phone, ‘That’s what men do. They fuck you over then sit in the living room listening to Leonard Cohen, slitting their wrists. That’s what they do.’
Clearly this girl has somehow got hold of my secret method for dating. Basically, if you end up spending a Saturday evening looking like this:
A sim card, another in the series of drawing small things unnervingly large.
I want this to be cleaner. I think the thing I really liked about the sim card was the sense of everything being a little delicate and just so. Like the circuit in the chip. Or the shape of the space that wraps around the sim, like little brackets. And I think you lose that sense with the wonky lines. So yeah, will probably start obsessing now about how everything must be straaaaaaight.
Last week a friend told me about Know Your Meme, and since then I’ve spent a truly brain-damaging amount of time giggling at crass, heartless, random in-jokes. God I love the internet.
From the fashion collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I promise you that in real life, these are all really elegant. Somehow, when I got finished with them, they had aquired a much more sinister air. Shading problems had turned the middle two into rags and a shroud respectively, and I assure fans of Yves St-Laurent that in the display cabinet, the one on the far right looked much less like an evil robot. The one on the left, the Thierry Mugler, actually came out looking pretty accurate. Unfortunately, in the company of the others, ‘graceful sophisticate’ slips so easily into ‘cruel henchwoman’.
Elsewhere in the gallery they were exhibiting some designs by Royal College of Art students. This one, by Liam Jackson, I liked a lot. According to the label he’s combining cycle courier and the illustrations for Oliver Twist by George Cruikshank. And you know, I’m perfectly all right with that.
Drawing-wise I was happier with this one. The only thing is that in my haste to get on with drawing it, I estimated the proportions wrong and ended up running off the page at the shoulders. But then, the mannequin didn’t have a head anyway, so no harm no foul.
One more thing: this was my first foray into drawing stuff in a museum. I was pretty self-conscious, as though one of the families of French tourists might be looking over my shoulder at any moment, deciding that I wasn’t good enough to be one of those people who draws in museums. Which, of course, is all in my head. All you need is one of those nerdy folding stools they hand out and instantly you are one of those people who draws in museums. I’m sure it’s one of those things where, once you do it a few times, the self-consciousness goes away. Or the Art Cops turn up, one or the other.
Last night I dashed up to my room (in between dinner and X Factor – oh god yes, I admit it) to do a drawing. I discovered one of the cats on my bed sleeping, thought ‘aw, that’ll be nice’ and trained my laser-like drawing eyes on him. Except he just WOULDN’T SIT STILL, and so after three attempts…
…each aborted when he got up to rearrange himself and laid back down with his head conveniently turned 45 degrees from the way it had been, I gave up. Instead I drew the seed matchbook I got at a restaurant this week. Then I watched some trashy TV with the flatmates. Saturday evening, and I was a beaten man.
You know those scenes in movies where a single guy is taking care of someone else’s baby, and when he wanders through a park it’s like he’s wearing a sign that says ‘I am hot. Please come on to me now’? This evening I discovered the Covent Garden equivalent of that.
I was getting a coffee while waiting for a friend, and doing today’s drawing. As soon as I got the notebook out, I was getting all the looks from all the boys. It was as though they saw a guy perched at a café, sketching away, and suddenly he was a tender arty romance waiting to happen. Perhaps in that second it took for that lingering look, soft-focus fantasies were running through their heads involving smooching and too much wine, and the phrase ‘I have to draw you’.
When really what I would actually say would be closer to ‘shush, I have to draw a scribbly picture of the place I’m about to go buy comics from’.
I think this is the first drawing I’ve done where I’ve actually had to think about proportions beforehand. Mostly I’ve drawn things to the same dimensions they occupy in my field of vision, so I just copy what I see onto the page. With this one, though, I knew I wanted both the tree and the taxi on my little notebook page, so I had to think about squeezing them both on. There was a lot of comparing the size and placement of one thing to another – ‘OK, the left side of the door is directly under the right side of the taxi light…there.’
I’m sort of surprised it’s my first go at that. How have I gone three weeks without changing the sizes of anything? The taxi is a bit stretched in the length – I kind of want to plump it up from the sides, like a pillow – but otherwise I think the proportions are OK. I remember from drawing it, though, that it was really difficult to keep everything in the drawing where it was in reality. Put a tyre in the wrong place and suddenly it throws off the windows.
This is a sign in Bank station. The most fun about this one was trying to get all the different shades when colouring the tiles. Actually no, it’s a three-way tie between that, reproducing Gill Sans in handwriting and the fact that someone went to the trouble of putting stylised feathers on the arrow. Thank you, designers of the past.
