Prepare

  During the Saturday morning session of 'Faith and the Arts', Josie got up on stage and started painting an amazing portrait of Eric Ajaye, our bass man for the week. As she prepared to paint, she popped on an old shirt, and I was struck by the image of her 'putting on the mantle of an artist'. She had been inspiring me all week with her skills and her being challenged to paint in a much looser style. And as she painted, I did this sketch, also in a slightly looser style than I usually do, trying to capture some of her energy.

  But to paint like this, Josie had to do a certain amount of preparation, preparing her board, preparing her sketch outlines, most of all, preparing herself. As I say, putting on the mantle of an artist...

Definition of MANTLE

1

a : a loose sleeveless garment worn over other clothes :cloak

b : a figurative cloak symbolizing preeminence or authority, mantle of leadership 

variety...

I've just glanced over the things I’ve done for Illustration Friday this last month or so. I hadn’t realised that there was such a variety of styles and techniques! Going backwards from here we have

• ·         paper sculpture combined with carved MDF to create a kinetic artwork
• ·         drawings done in Flash using only the shapes tools
• ·         a cartoon done with a fineline pen and markers
• ·         a cartoon cat scanned, vectorised and coloured in Flash
• ·         a watercolour
• ·         two photos and some drawn elements combined in photoshop
• ·         a gouache painted paper sculpture mounted on a flash back ground
• ·         another cartoon scanned and coloured in Flash
• ·         my old blog header, done in photoshop, probably, with photo of my head which I traced and cartoonified, probably in Flash using my old Wacom tablet
• ·         scan of my sketch pad with other graphic elements added
• ·         fineline drawing
• ·         google sketchup 3d graphics
• ·         and a drawing done with a biro

I have a bunch of other vector drawing programs, but I still like the style that Flash mx gives me. But then, I guess I’m a little weird…