NOW THAT Mastering Silhouettes is out of my hands I have some time to return to the studio and do some painting. My biggest inspiration so far this year has been the (very crowded) David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy, so I’ve been making iPhone drawings.
After Mastering Silhouettes
Inspired by David Hockney’s example I set about teaching myself to draw on my iPhone (I haven’t yet managed to graduate to an iPad). I’m using an app called Brushes. I started with fairly simple subjects such as a pot of breakfast marmalade. Drawing on an iPhone naturally leads to sharing the work with others, so before long I found myself tweeting the resulting images on a daily basis. This has become a kind of project for me, to supply a ‘picture-a-day’ to my followers on Twitter. I’m not sure how long I can keep it up.
So far most are iPhone drawings, but I could expand the twitter feed to include life studies and (of course) cut-out silhouettes. If you would like to be one of them you can see the work so far and add your name to the list on Twitter @roving_artist.
I start by blocking out the main colours in a rough way. Then I use progressively smaller brushes to refine the image and add more detail. The app does allow the use of layers, but I find it hard to think in layers so all these images are painted in a single layer. Mostly I just look at light and shade.
Drawing in the way I found myself curiously attracted to the shadows cast by various objects, often more than the objects themselves. Here are some of my favourite iPhone drawings so far. You can click them to see a larger version.
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