The first row

One more from Monsieur Fragonard since I am still under a pile but hoping to do some more drawing tomorrow.
I just love the range of marks he can get and the way the tones are organised, you never lose the logic of the different materials, spaces and shapes. You keep a sense of ‘here’s the dress, here’s the arm, this is the cabinet’ etc. Also I love the way the urn is drawn, so economic, so sure. I don’t know why more people don’t look at his stuff.. One of my stodgy efforts coming up next and hopefully, quite soon.

Work is totally on top of me now again (sigh) so I haven’t been able to even look at Tumblr let alone post up anything. I am thou, half way through a big picture and hope to get back to it in the next couple of days. In the meantime, here is one by someone who really can draw, Fragonard. Stylish, lovely touch and lots of energy under an elegant surface. More later..

Tried out using a ‘tracing image’ for this one and I am not sure about it.
Obviously it’s good being able to trace the basic drawing so that ‘it all fits on the screen’. Sometimes I struggle with basic drawing.
But with the process of filling in the colours and painting over them, I am not so sure, it reminds me of things you do like dry point etching, where I remember forever looking to see what it would look like and always found that I had done less than I thought.
All done with Pen and Ink.

Back to the drawing board. Stupidly, I left my Hand Stylus behind on holiday and have to use my finger again to do the drawing - gnash! Still with the pen and ink app, still on the phone.

Rain Check
I thought I just made this post - but nothing seems to have come of it, I suppose it got lost in the Internet somewhere or other.
Probably a good thing, I was talking about this app Pen and Ink and got sidetracked when I mentioned that you can move the canvas around so that it is easy to paint and draw the edges and the corners. In Paper (which I really like by the way) I get fed up with the notifications thing flying down whenever you draw a stroke near it. With Pen and Ink you can avoid that wi a pinch and drag and a move of your canvas to one side or down to the centre.
The other point I noticed again was that the app seemed to get slow and delayed or laggy towards the end of the picture. Tis could be due to the limitations of my iPad 3 as much as the app though.

I made this with Pen & Ink for iPad. Rain Check.
It’s quite a good app. Free to install then you have to unlock the features - which you would definitely want to do.
When you unlock, you get the full range of colours and brush variants. I am so used to Paper that I thought at first you could only go with the default set of colours but double tapping gives you a colour mixer and crucially, a set of recently used colours.
It’s terrible for me to admit but when I used to paint, I had trouble mixing the exact same colour twice. Guilty secret, I know, real artists can do that, straightaway, no trouble at all, not me though.
Anyway, the only thing I really noticed about this app tonight was that if got distinctly laggy with all my verbose drawing style and I suppose that it’s storing all those strokes.
I did the black layer first and then put colours on another over the top - in case I messed it all up. There was already four or five layers set up in the palette. Tat didn’t seem to affect performance though.
One thing I do like, you can set the tools to fly down to a small reduced palette so there is no accidental tool switching like I do a lot in Paper. I know that you can send them to the bottom in Paper but then you end up making loads of unwanted marks trying to get the palette up again, this app seems neater in that respect.

drmeek:

alley scene

Great sense of light, particularly in the lower half!

This one was done with ‘Art Set’ its only 69p, probably 99 American cents or so.

There are no in app purchases and it offers some very good features: replication of traditional media and tools; choice of textured paper, paper variants and weights and canvas backgrounds.

Also it has some interesting tools that will only be familiar to those of you who have used traditional real world media.

To be honest, there is one in there that I had never known about and had to ask in an art materials shop what it was used for (its a kind of white smudging stick that seems to be made of hard pulped cardboard in real life).

Next time I use this, I’ll jot down some notes about the advantages and disadvantages of the app, but in the meantime its certainly fun to try out and for 69p/99c, you can’t really go too far wrong.

I decided to try out some other apps after having done so much with Paper. I am going to do more wi Paper but here are my first experiments. A still life with ‘Pen and Ink’. The app is free but you have to pay for the full functionality - I got it for about £1.50 but it seems to be about £2.99 now. I’ll do a few more with these apps and pass on what I think about them at the same time.
I have been impressed with what some of you do with other apps so hopefully, any tips or pros and cons I can pass on will be a help.