Fiat - rear former

Today the former for the rear bodywork was temporarily put in place to give an idea of how it would fit. Suddenly the car looks massively long - and very purposeful. The finished thing is going to be very impressive. I've started a flickr gallery of photos of the build too...

Fiat - Front axle

Thought I'd try something with a bit more detail today. I've seen people like Scott Robertson using ballpoint pens to draw futuristic car and spaceship designs and thought I'd try it out. It actually works quite well - I can't write with one at all but they're not bad for drawing with - allowing you to lay down very feint perspective and construction guides which can later be made heavier and clearer.

This image shows the front axle, part of the suspension and the wonderful radiator which comes up to about nose height. That swooping shape on the left arm of the chassis is a wooden former for a part which will later be made in aluminium. There are various pieces like this which can be bolted on to make the car more streamlined...

I later added a bit of colour in photoshop. With a bit of tidying up I'd be able to hide the outlines altogether. If I get time I'll give it a go...

Fiat - rear suspension

The rear wheels were off today and a little more of the wooden frame is in place. This will be shaped to fit the curves of the rear bodywork and will support the seats. It also houses the fuel tank. Mostly it's held together with beautifully done joints but the firewall has been screwed on - using big reclaimed screws from the same period...


An interesting thing i saw today was how almost every part right down to individual nuts and bolts are stamped with matching pairs of numbers so that you know exactly where they belong - almost like the joints on an oak framed building. If you look closer still you can see other scribed lines and dots - showing where to cut or file to. It's great to be able to see marks made by the engineers 100 years ago - it really brought home to me how hand-crafted cars used to be compared to todays machine made ones.

Workbench with gearbox

Bit pushed for time today so I picked the most complicated thing in the room to draw. This is the gearbox for the Fiat laid out on the workbench. I'll try to do a longer sketch one day which shows it in a bit more detail...

Look out there's a monster coming...

One of the most exciting cars in history has to be the Fiat S76 from 1911. Also known as the 'Beast of Turin' it has a whacking great 28 litre, four cylinder engine - good for shooting 3 yard flames, blowing people's hats off and singeing their eyebrows according to some reports. It's also supposed to be good for over 130mph - but it never managed to set an official record despite attempts at Brooklands, Saltburn ad Ostend.

Hopefully one day this will change thanks to a dedicated builder and racer of crazy automobiles I met recently. He's managed to track down the chassis, axles and steering of one car and the engine of the other and bit by bit the monster is taking shape again. Better still, he's very kindly allowed me to come and sketch the build. I couldn't be happier and I think it'll make a great parallel to the build of the Bloodhound SSC car that I'll also be documenting this year. I can't believe my luck at having not one, but two LSR cars being built on my doorstep.

Here it is at it currently stands. Whilst it awaits it's pistons it's having a beautiful oak frame built to support the seats and the bodywork surrounding the passenger area. Measurements are taken from massive, full scale drawings lovingly lettered with gothic script - the plans even show the wood grain! This first sketch was done as a quick warm up using Adobe Ideas on the iPad...

Next I thought I'd try a more detailed sketch in pencil and wash but I'm a bit rusty and it's a little heavy handed. Still, you can see the triangular oak supports an a bit of the massive flywheel which is attached to a crankshaft that looks like it belongs on a steam train...


There are several other of my favourite cars to draw too. This one's a GN Vitesse often seen at VSCC meets. It's currently being rebuilt after a rather frightening roll. The engine is an 8.2 litre Curtiss. The engine cover is where the seat should be, the seat is on the cowl and the back axle is on the floor...


A GN Anzani with a 3.5 litre V Twin. Apparently the first time it was started the front wheels were bouncing off the ground...


Day two and another quick one of the Fiat - firewall temporarily in place. There are some wonderful details such as streamlined covers for the end of the chassis - even the starting handle was sharpened to a point. People often write this car off as an over sized relic, built before people knew what they were doing but it's plainly not true. Fiat were one of the top, if the not the top builders of Grand Prix cars. Despite the massive size of the engine it actually has quite a small frontal area and was much more streamlined than anything else at the time...

Everard's Print Works

I made a short video about using Adobe Ideas for sketching and this is the subject I chose to draw. It's Edward Everard's print works in Bristol. They were designed in about 1900 and feature wonderful tiles illustrating some of Everard's influences - Gutenberg and William Morris. It's a beautiful building sandwiched between some modern attrocities - infact the building was almost demolished in 1967. That really would have been a great shame. Bristol lost much of its architectural heritage in the war but it seems they couldn't stop after either.

The sketch took about 50 mins. I'll add the video as well as soon as Adobe have released it.

New Print - The Land Speed Record

You may have spotted the post about the Bloodhound Art Show, well this is the print i made for it. It features (hopefully) all the official land speed record holding cars. I wanted to highlight how the size and shape have changed over the years and so they are as close to the correct size in relation to each other as I could get them (I used a combination of photos, stats and video clips to try and establish the sizes).

Like the last VSCC print they are signed and numbered, on museum quality paper and printed with archival inks. This time it's A2 in size and it's an edition of 1000 (to match the 1000mph the Bloodhound team are aiming for). The cost is £40 +p&p and £10 of every one will got to help fund the Bloodhound Educational Project. Hope you like it...

ZenBrush App - quick test

ZenBrush - $2.99
Found another nice drawing app for the iPad. Again it's quite limited in terms of features but it makes up for that with a really nice, speed sensitive brush mark. It only has three opacities of black and an eraser, no zoom, no layers and only one undo. But that makes it very quick and intuitive to use. Plus points are - there's not much lag, a beautiful brush and a few different paper options. I can see myself using this for sketching quite a bit.

More Ideas

Still playing around with adobe ideas. I'm enjoying making custom palettes and then just sticking to those 5 colours. I think it gives it a sort of screen printed look (although the colours do look slightly different on the ipad - perhaps it's a mac gamma thing).

Bloodhound SSC Art Show

The Bloodhound team are having a little art show on the theme of 'Speed'. It opens this Friday and should run for a week I think. Some of the art will be auctioned off to raise money for their education programme. I've got a couple of prints on display - one of which I've done especially for it. The full size show car will be there too. So if anyone is in the Bristol area please pop in and have a look - or if you come on Friday, say hello. (Follow signs for the SS Great Britain and next door to it you'll see a square, red brick building which used to be the Maritime Heritage Museum - it's in there)...

UPDATE...
Just heard that they have a photographer coming to do a shoot so the show has been taken down early. That was quick wasn't it. I'll let you know if any other interesting events happen.

More ipad fun

Still experimenting with the ipad paint apps. Here's a quick sketch of Cathy watching tv - done with the adobe ideas app...


And looking out of the window, a couple of cloud studies done in Art Rage...


I have a couple of new apps to add to the reviews too. First...

Quill. $0.99
Similar to adobe ideas in that it's vector based. Has the addition of an italic nib and filled shapes too. Worth a look for the price.
Like: Cheap, italic nib has more character than plain round, shapes
Don'tlike: They seem to get flipped when emailing the images as pdf's - perhaps I' not doing it right, crashed on me yeterday and I lost some doodles.


TypeDrawing. $2.99
Not sure how often I'll use this but it's still a lot of fun. You type something in, choose a font and then draw with the text...

iPad paint software review

One of the reasons I haven't posted much lately is because I've been distracted by a new toy piece of serious technology which I need for work. I've always been a pc user and I'm not going to get into a pc/mac debate - there are things I like about both. Actually I don't really think of the iPad as a computer - I'm not entirely sure what it is. It's silent, keeps cool, doesn't need to boot up and the battery lasts all day. The interface is great and very intuitive - and then there's the apps...

I've had a lot of fun exploring all the strange games and widgets but for me the single most interesting thing was the ability to have photoshop-like software with me anywhere. I quickly downloaded a few of the most popular ones and although I've only been doodling so far I thought I'd share my experiences. First up...

Brushes. $7.99
Like:Not too laggy. Good selection of tweakable brushes without being too cluttered. Ability to play back sequence of strokes is brilliant. Layers.
Don't like: Can't make a dot (tapping screen brings up menu), Can't make quicktimes from playback on a PC (as far as I'm aware)


Sketchbook Pro. $7.99
Like: Least laggy of the ones i've tried so far. loads of features and brushes, layers, symmetry, clever shortcuts, speed sensitive stroke/opacity- even found some storyboard templates yesterday.


Livesketch. $1.99
This is like a cut down version of the Harmony procedural drawing program.
Like:It's reasonably fast, very pleasing and unexpected results.
Don't like: It's a pity it doesn't have a few more of the Harmony brushes.


Inspire Pro. £2.39
Haven't tried too much with this yet. It's supposed to simulate oils (not something I've done much of).
Like: reasonably fast, uncluttered, nice blending.
Don't like: Cant draw dots easily (you can do it by putting your finger down and twisting it), splash screen :)


Adobe Ideas. $Free.
Funny one this - I think it's vector based. You can zoom in to huge amounts and draw really detailed little drawings the size of ants. The brush strokes get smoothed too. To export the vector images you export to email - otherwise they get converted to jpegs.
Like: Fast, smoothing, large document size, palette creating tool
Don't like:Limited tools (a pen and an eraser). Have to pay for extra layers (but it is free so I can't really complain).


Artist's Touch. $4.99
Like: reasonably quick, nice splodgy paint daubs for gestural sketches.
Don't like: Colour palette interface (big long list), can't draw dots (brings up menu again)


Art Rage. $6.99
I'm a big fan of this on my PC - it's cheap, has excellent tools and a very intuitive interface.
Like:Tools, layers, everything really
Don't like: Unfortunately it's probably the most laggy - but I am starting to get used to working a little slower


That's it for now. It's not very in-depth and there may be some things which I'm wrong about because I haven't found everything out yet but it'll give you an overview of what's available. One other thing that's worth mentioning is that none of these have the ability to tweak contrast etc. so I found a useful free app called PhotoPad which will do that and more. So far I've really enjoyed drawing on the iPad - even though it's not pressure sensitive. I'll post some more pictures done with it soon.

Oh, and the boxwave stylus seems to work quite nicely too. A bit short but glides nicely over the screen.

Airports

Sorry the posts have been a bit thin on the ground recently. I haven't done a huge amount of drawing from life lately but I did manage to get a few quick sketches done on a recent trip to Denmark...

Hot Rod Doodles

There's a great hot rod forum called the HAMB. It has a very active art show every friday with some terrific work - everything from pinstriping to sculpture, photography, paintings - even lino cuts. That's the thing I like about Hot Rod culture - the art is such an important part of it. The cars themselves, being unique, are expressions of the builders artistic vision. Anyway, enough waffling - I did these for that...

My first print run!

I've had quite a lot of nice comments about those little car thumbnails. So much so that I thought I'd try a run of prints. I 've found a local printer and we spent Friday afternoon tweaking the image and trying out different papers and I now have now the first batch of A3 prints in my hands. I'm really pleased with how they came out. I've decided to limit them to 100 prints and they are signed and numbered. If anybody would like one I'm selling them for £35 including postage in Europe or the USA (if you're somewhere else please get in touch and I'll calculate the extra shipping cost).

Goodwood Revival

Found out on Thursday that I'd have Friday free so I got a last minute ticket for the Revival - only Friday tickets were available so I didn't manage to get a huge amount of drawing done. It was pretty chilly too and I didn't do too much watercolour this time as I hadn't packed my big waterbrush. Still, I had a fantastic time, jaw-droppingly beautiful cars abounded and I managed to get a few nice photos in as the sun set too. I'll be posting some images on flickr shortly.

First up is the 1959 Maserati Birdcage. It was fun trying to capture the curves of this beautiful car. I thought I'd done alright but Cathy said it looked like an A level piece. Perhaps it is a bit stiff - first one of the day, the cold etc etc...


I like a challenge so I had a go at the BRM H16. They had a beautiful selection of BRM's there...


This is a very quick sketch of a supercharged Austin Special - Mrs JoJo...


This is a rather stunning Bugatti Type 54 from 1931...


You'll notice that I've drawn a lot of these from the same angle - I didn't have a paddock pass so mostly I was restricted to drawing these from over or through the fence. Unfortunately this famous ERA had had its engine removed - you can see part of it on the ground next to it...


I quickly tried to get this last sketch in as the light disappeared. It's a beautiful car with a wonderful, well used look...

Bloodhound

Next door to where I work is a small building that used to be the Maritime Heritage Center. It's currently being used by Richard Noble's Bloodhound team - who are hoping to build a car that will exceed 1000mph. Here's a quick sketch of the full size mock up which is used to raise money and excitement for the project at various shows and events. It looks stunning and I can't believe my luck at having something like this going on so close to home...

Kilve

Kilve is on the Somerset coast. It's very interesting geologically - with a beach made of large sloping shelves of rock and some shaly cliffs behind. It's quite a good spot for fossil hunting too with lots of ammonites. It's only about an hour from where we live so we went for a picnic. Here the shale cliffs have eroded to leave the silhouette of a face...


... and it would be silly to go this close to Devon without stopping for a cream tea. These ruins are in the gardens of the Chantry Tea Gardens. The scones were excellent - should have only had one though...

Dragster

Went to a small local car show at Mark Moor. I was with the family but managed to get time to do a quick sketch of this Dragster - "The Canon Reloaded"...

Devon

Went camping in Devon for a few days. Didn't rain but there was a cold wind - which put us off sending much time on the beach. Still, we had a fun time exploring the area and had a nice view of Burgh Island from the tent. Here's a couple of quick sketches.

Burgh Island - with it's famous Art Deco Hotel...


Newton Ferrers and Totnes. Some of the architecture was very interesting - particularly in the back streets of Totnes - but there wasn't enough time to draw it all unfortunately...


and Dartington Hall - went a bit wrong with the windows...