Movillustrations 2013: Day 25 – Van Dyck

I’m raising money for Prostate Cancer UK by drawing a different mustachioed man every day during November. Day 25 is the Flemish Baroque artist Anthony van Dyck.



This drawing is based on Van Dyck's self-portrait which is in the news at the moment as the Art Fund and the National Portrait Gallery are running a fundraising campaign to acquire Van Dyck's magnificent final self-portrait for the nation.

If you’ve enjoyed looking at my drawings, please visit my Just Giving page and donate whatever you can. Thank you.
http://www.justgiving.com/movillustration-2013

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (Creative Project #15: Self-Portrait)

My friend Cathy set up the Facebook group Creative Project as "a way to start getting people on facebook to communicate their ideas, sketches, and creative process out in the open". Each month Cathy posts a Quote/Theme/Word as a starting point for members to create something - photography, drawings, sketches, videos, beats, music, ...anything creative!

This month's them was Self-Portrait, and I used my laptop camera to bring up an image of myself onscreen that I could draw from. I also decided to draw myself as I appear in my comic strips...

Dr. Strangeblog or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Timeline

I have a Facebook page for Paul Shinn Draws where I post links to my blog and website, and keep people up-to-date with what I'm doing drawing-wise. If you haven't already, I'd be happy if you "Liked" it...

Anyway, recently I was notified that at the end of this month my page would automatically be updated to Facebook's new Timeline profile. Now while I'm slightly unimpressed with the overall layout of this new profile – and Facebook's marketing of this new design as a great way to "tell your life story" – I was intrigued by the prospect of including a cover image to my page, which is basically a landscape image which spans the width of the page layout.

So, seeing that I was soon going to be forced to adopt this new layout, I figured I might as well draw something to use as my cover image, giving a concise summary of what I do, and make the change sooner, rather than later...

Attack The Blog: Life imitating art...?

Way back in January, I posted on this blog about all the layout changes being implemented on Facebook, and included a self-portrait inspired by Shephard Fairey's "Hope" poster featuring Barack Obama.

I liked this image and, after changing the text at the bottom, I used it on the cover of a 12-page booklet I designed to send out to publishers and magazines in order to promote my illustration work...



Yesterday I was attending a wedding and was wearing a suit with a red tie, and it suddenly seemed as though my real life was imitating my drawing...

Illustration course part 4

Day 2, and I was going around the college making drawings and collecting ideas for a piece based around the course itself. As it was the Easter holiday, the college was pretty deserted, so I wandered around the empty rooms and hallways making quick sketches of interesting shapes and angles I discovered...

I also found this stained-glass window in one of the stairwells, which was a bit spooky-looking (and reminded me of the haunted painting from the film Ghostbusters 2). I also liked how it was in complete contrast with it's surroundings, so I made a quick record of it using crayons to try to capture the colours...

Next I decided on a slight change of tact, and had a wander around some of the studio spaces upstairs. Again these were completely deserted, but students had left all their work out in the process of putting together an exhibition. Walking around I discovered a mirror that someone had left placed on an easel. I decided to do a self portrait of myself in the studio...

...I was really pleased with how this came out. I went straight in with a blue roller ball pen, rather than making any pencil sketches first. Another thing that differed from my normal drawing style was the fact that I was standing up resting my sketchbook in my arm, rather than sat at a flat surface. I really like the spontaneity and expressiveness that this gives to the line work. It also made me see that although perhaps technically some of the drawing isn't "correct", it definitely captures a moment and has a definite feel to the drawing.

Getting back to the class before we reviewed the work we'd done that morning, I felt boosted by this new style to my drawing and as we were still waiting for a few people to come back, I used the time to make quick 3-minute sketches of some of my classmates while they were drawing. Taking what I'd discovered from drawing my self-portrait, I worked straight in with a black roller ball pen, and sat with my sketchbook resting in my hand...

I was really finding drawing straight in pen to be a liberating experience in terms of my line work, and being bolder with my drawing. When I made mistakes, rather than reaching for the rubber, I just reworked the image to get the shape or angle, and felt that my work was better for that. After lunch, I decided to carry on exploring this approach and drew the rest of my classmates as they went around the college drawing...

I want to work all these elements into some kind of finished piece. I discussed my ideas with our teacher during the course, and have a few ideas that I am going to work on developing further.