Drawing Footballers

Using Newspaper Photographs

Newspaper photographs: I use them all the time for reference and inspiration. Here are some examples of drawings from newspaper photos:

Different Kinds of Drawing

Drawing people asleep on trains.

Drawing air hostesses and nervous young men.

Drawing people having tea in a cafe in a park.

Drawing a back yard.

Drawing china.

My Studio in the Kitchen

Doing some sketchbook work, using a newspaper photograph for reference. For this picture I used oil pastels, Caran d'Ache water-soluble crayons, some pencil, and a bit of ink wash.

What else can you do with an old sketchbook page?

I don't want any half-hearted sketchbooks. So today I started a project to go through my current "Reportage & Copying" book and add to some of the pages - adding tone with ink and water and pencil into line drawings. I just wanted to take an insipid page and see what I could do with it.
Looking at the results, I see that much as I love line drawing, a fully fleshed out picture with a variety of tone, sometimes created by different media, is more captivating. On the picture of the houses  I filled in with diluted ink washes, grey crayon, and yellow felt tip pen. The white window frames are done with a Tippex pen.

Monoprint and collage.

"You Are the Frame"

The original idea of this comes from a letter my friend David Loft sent me in 1975 or 76. He was in Paris and he wrote something about the faces of people, and other things he was seeing, and he wrote ..."you are the frame". So that's the idea. When I did this I was working in a very free and experimental way. It was really lovely working like that. 

The background is a quickly done mono-print with some words in, not very legible. Then I made the faces and figure by first creating textured paper with thick acrylic brush strokes with white paint on cartridge paper. I painted the people with gouache on that textured paper, and cut them out. I glued them on to the monoprint. It is A3 size.

A chalk pastel picture.

This is an A3 picture done in chalk pastels. It was part of a project I did at college based on people in the streets of Cambridge. The pose of the woman comes from a real person who was sitting on a bench looking lovely, so I asked her if she would mind me taking a picture of her. She didn't mind, but her whole demeanour changed when she knew I was taking her photo, she looked quite stiff and shy.

Anyway, she was wearing a pale blue jacket, so that changed. And the odd figure beside her is just imagined by me. And the huge flowers.