Sketching on my iPad

This week I bought a brand new iPad.

Last weekend I had lunch with my sketching friends to hear all about the Urban Sketcher Symposium in Santo Domingo from Liz Steel who attended.
Liz brought me back the most wonderful gift – a sketch in watercolour and pen by Simonetta Capecchi I will have to photograph it and post it, with Simo’s permission of course.

Liz told me that France Belleville had recommended Procreate as a sketching app on IPad. I’m pretty sure Procreate owned Painter at one time. When I went to the Apple store on Monday morning the girl who attended to me also recommended it, and she said she’d tried them all. It was my first purchase from the App Store.

Last night I tried to figure it out and did this pencil drawing, but more importantly, later I worked out how to download the User Guide. Tonight I read it, then did a little tweaking, and hey presto, here is my first image from the iPad.

This is also my first blog post from the iPad, so I haven’t worked out if I can preview yet, or it I just have to go for it.

The Enmore Goth Collection

These are the stamps that are in my Enmore booklet.

The first, with the horses is that one that started it all.  I photographed these horses at the Blue Moon festival when they were having a rest from parading the  main street, I added a cobweb, just to bring a bit more red into the stamp.

The second is my black cat with green eyes, Arabella. I put a pentacle in the background  for some added Gothic.

The third stamp is a building in Enmore Road, known as ‘The Old Dispensary’.  I turned my own photo into a line drawing and added some free clip art bats flying out of it. I didn’t know anything about the building at the time, but I have since started going to physiotherapy in the old dispensary itself. (No bats.)

 

Enmore Gothic Artist’s Book

This artist’s book is in an exhibition that opened on Friday night at Gallery Red  in Glebe, Sydney.  Enmore is the next suburb to Newtown, where I live,  but in reality it is a continuation. Once you get onto Enmore Road it becomes Goth Central.  This page will give you some idea.

Every October there is the Blue Moon Festival. The Goths are out in their finery, the undertakers host a sausage sizzle and the funeral carriage with black horses wearing plumes go up and down the main street.  A couple of years ago I photographed the horses and it got me thinking that if Enmore was a country, then the stamps would be gothic.

I made this coffin shaped stamp holder booklet and created some Enmore Gothic stamps in Photoshop using mostly my own photos and a few pieces of free clip art.

I’ll show you some bigger pictures of the stamps themselves next time I post.

Smart Alex

I get my hair done at Smart Alex. Well. it’s really been Smart Brian for a long time now. Alex died about the same time as Diana. Like her, he was English, blond, and liked a bit of drama. I picture them up there, blond heads together… Diana is filling in Alex about life with the royal family. In this image, Diana has just told Alex a story. His response, which you can see she appreciates, is “She what ? She NEVER!”

This image was put together for World Aids Day. I still miss Alex for his stories.

Note: No disrespect is meant to the Queen. It’s just that this image always springs to mind when I think of Alex and how much he would have loved to have a gossip with Diana and know the inside story.