Concert

This sketch I did at my daughter's concert has caused ripples outside of my own limited audience. It has started a process of re-assessment of what I should be doing whether for good or bad. In the pass, when I have been to concerts, it has been usually 'bonus' reading time and listening to music, whilst reading in just another form of multi-tasking. Nevertheless, I knew I was not going to get away with that at this concert, so I took my sketch pad along. I was pleased that I didn't take a book to read as the hall was filled with parents and pupils who sat at the back.

When I decided to sketch, I decided on using 'rotring felt tips' and I focus on the back of the hall with the marvellous organ pipes. I will layout a light pencil guide for proportion before starting. Then using a thin point, before gradually using heavier tips as I moved across the page. If I am unsure about an area, again I will work from light to heavy.

This takes me back to my printmaking days at college where the plate or Perspex engraving would start with a light line layout just to see how the print would look. Then I would add details and proof up in several stages. This I found would give me control over the medium and I could correct a defect or incorporate it. Putting a blowtorch to a Perspex plastic engraving nearly knocked me out with the fumes. Yet, it gave me a wonderful textured pockmarked surface. Then it cracked going through the etching press and made a wonderful white line throughout the image. I was at the time influenced by the wonderful Arthur Boyd etchings.

My concert drawing was not the first rotring one I had recently done. In some ways, it was because one of my ipals liked a street scene that I had original drew in broader felt tips as I wanted to 'do something' that day. Less than 20 minutes, stood in a crowded the High Street and at the time, it felt average. Yet it got a great response and made me reconsider the drawing and pushed me into doing more street scenes around where I work.

Bryan Talbot's The Adventure of Luther Arkwright is a forerunner to the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' ground breaking graphic novel, The Watchmen. It is a stunning sequence of black and white imaginary and the use of 60's progressive film techniques in a comics form. Bryan's technique of using rotring pens to draw the story held my imagination ever since and it is to this graphic story that inspired early attempts with rotring pens. I will return to this graphic novel in a later post as Bryan Talbot and his work.

The concert drawing took over hour and quarter and although there was a change of pupils during it. I was able to get eldest daughter in the picture. What surprised me the most the joy I had drawing the musicians and wish it was something that I done soon. At one time, I had hoped to draw theatre productions, but I never followed through with it.

I was v. pleased with the concert drawing, scanning and jpegging it to daughter. She then forwarded it onto her house mistress, who in turn sends it on to the Music department. So when we were at parents' evening, it was a case of, 'Hi, we are H's parents', then in reply, 'Are you the Artistic one?' She then called the head of the department who was engaged in another parents' conversation over and we had a brief couple of words. Both were v. impressed, the head of music said how the jpeg was printed off and now displayed in the music department.

I was later praised from elsewhere for the sketch and told this might be my forte. So that one day I picked up a copy of Near Myths with the cover featuring the Prussian Helicarrier in St Petersburg from the Luther Arkwright serial as echoed down through the years. I am thinking of how to do more 'polished' work with these rotring felts.