There has been a meme going around YouTube for a little while called “Drawing My Life”. YouTubers tell the story of their lives while drawing, usually with stickmen drawn with dry wipe markers on a whiteboard. A lot of people have asked me to do a draw my life video over the last few months.
The trouble is that most of the people who make draw my life videos are quite young and they manage to fit most of their lives into one video. Well, I’ve been around quite a few years now, so I’m going to have to do quite a few episodes!
Also, I should really try to draw with something a bit more like the rest of my channel, with pens and markers or watercolour. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while, How I should go about it, how I should break my life up into episodes and what are the best bits to draw?
I think I’ve worked out the formula and, with some trepidation, I have started on what is going to be a pretty massive project. I could really do with your support if you like it. Please tweet, share, Facebook and tell al your friends on all the forms of social media you use. If you do – many thanks.
It’s going to be a bit of a history lesson too, so you may find it informative and useful in schools!
Learn to draw a fountain pen!
This is not the easiest thing in the world to draw, but with a bit of practice I worked out the basics to get it looking right. Follow the instructions and see how you do!
This is for the British International school School in Brussels, where I visited this week. We had a lot of fun and they said they would be drawing the Eiffel Tower very soon, so this is to help them all. Good luck guys!
YouTuber, Missy Den Dulk, asked me why I use pans and not tubes when I paint watercolours. Well, the answer is quite simple. I don’t do very big pictures, so pans are just fine for me.
Tubes are great for when you need to make big washes on a larger painting, but they do need to be squeezed out onto a palette, whereas a tin of pans is ready as soon as you open it up. The tin even has built in palettes or wells.
If you are going out sketching quickly then pans in a tin are so much more convenient. I’ve also found that aquash brushes are really good for sketching out and about.
This Painting is currently for sale!
This video was requested by YouTuber, portal2canttouchtis, who asked me to show how to draw a crow. I thought I would do better than that, I’d show you how to paint one too! It took much longer than I thought it would, so I split the video into two parts. Part one shows how to draw the crow and part two shows how I painted it with a running commentary on my thought process, choosing colours and styles of applying paint.
I hope you like this. If you do, let me know and also let me know if you would like me to do something on my monday videos on the ShooRayner channel on YouTube.
Learn to draw a feather
Ever painted a picture and the paper all crinkles upon you? Here’s the solution you’ve been looking for!
You probably decided water colour painting wasn’t worth the effort because the paper crinkled. Well well, now you can go back and try again and have wonderful professional results. and it is amazing how much better a simple picture looks when it is neat and flat!
Dampen the back of the paper and lay it on a board, damp side down.
Then glue it to the table with wetted, gummed paper tape. let it all dry so the paper stretches nice and tight and start painting. When you are finished, let it dry out slowly then carefully cut it off the board with a craft knife. And … Voila! A lovely, flat masterpiece!
The paper I use in this video is really cheap, thin photocopy paper. You can do this with bristol or cartridge paper or watercolour paper. The higher the quality of the paper, the better the finished result will be.
Watch the video and see what I drew in my sketchbook as we wandered around East and West Berlin last weekend, taking in the sights and history.
I went with my wife and best friends to have a good look round and came away inspired and confused! I had to confront several prejudices, or should I say cultural attitudes, that I was unaware of having before. I realised that, even at my great age, I come with the ideas inculcated my upbringing in the social class and country I happen to have been born into.
I didn’t have much time to sketch so grabbed moments in cafes and while waiting for planes and trains.
There is so much history I don’t know and haven’t been taught, because it in not “our” history. The Pergamon Museum is similar to the British Museum. It has undergone war damage and rebuilding, but I was surprised that I knew so little about it and even more surprised by the contents.
The Gates of Babylon were stupendous! Then I realised they had been plundered and brought back to the museum to aggrandise the German Empire, to add the sparkle of previous, mighty empires to the the German Empire as was. But then, that is exactly what the British Museum is all about, and the Louvre. Each museum is filled with the booty hauled from each country’s colonial sphere of influence, to say, “Look how wonderful we are!”
Of course now we say that we are saving, conserving and displaying these cultural artefacts for the World, but that is a revisionist point of view!
I lived in Germany as a child, around the time the Berlin Wall was built. I don’t remember that event particularly, but the East Berlin we visited was in such a time warp, that I sometimes felt I was back there in the sixties, like a time machine. So much of Berlin is a facade. Bombed buildings are rebuilt in an old or ancient style with modern materials, bits of infrastructure from the 1950′ and 60s survive with a lick of 21st century paint on top. You are not quite sure if anything is real or original.
Stasi surveillance Camera in a Bird Box
After visiting the Stasi museum, I kept imagining hidden cameras every time I saw a camera-sized circular shape in a light fitting or poster, for instance.
The pace of development is amazing. Building going on everywhere. Eventually the split history of the place will be built over and it will become a single city again, but I certainly felt it was still a place of two halves. We kept asking ourselves, “Are we East or West?” You didn’t really need to look for the line on the map. The East still has a generation or two’s worth of development to catch up with the West, But they are getting there.
For a capital city, it does seem quite parochial though. It’s been left out of the internationalisation of other World Capitals for so long, it has a lot to do to catch up, in attitudes as well as facilities and infrastructure. We felt the general levels of service fell short of what you come to expect in major capital cities, these days.
We came home quite exhausted, both from physically doing so much and fitting in so much culture!
Hey! If you read this blog often, you may well be into drawing, so why not have a go at entering the inaugural Derwent Drawing Prize?
The Prize is open to all living British and international artists over the age of 18 years old on 1 July 2013 and there’s a total of £8750 in prize money. Closing date is 11:59PM ON 1 JULY 2013.
You can use any pencil including water-soluble, pastel, graphite, charcoal or colouring pencils on any 2 or 3 dimensional support.
KEY DATES
1 July 2013: Deadline for entry
15 July 2013: All artists notified of first stage selection process
w/c 9 September 2013: Delivery of work
16-21 September 2013: Exhibition opens to public
18 September 2013: Private View and Prize Winners announced
October – December 2013: Exhibition tour
The work selected for exhibition must be available from September to 31 December 2013.
Let me know if you win!
YouTube Follower, JSWHISS asked me to draw feet this week. I think hands are the hardest, but now I’m not so sure. I think I’ve been in denial about feet. If I can, I draw feet off the page or hide them behind something in the foreground, as that’s a lot simpler.
I generally find that if in doubt, I go to see what the Ancient Greeks did as they really knew how to draw and make it simple. That’s what I did when I was drawing my Olympia books that I show in the video.
If you were thinking of getting one or two copies, it really helps support this website and my drawing videos if you use the Amazon Links below. Thanks.
