Juicy Lines and Clay Things

Doodling in two and three dimensions

I was playing about in Procreate the other day, tweaking with some brushes, doodling. As you do. I found a fun brush that was pretty jittery and a little unpredictable - that’s kind of my drawing catnip, giving me enough of a lack of control to pump up the spontaneity and keep me actively trying to find the good drawing amongst all the wild lines I’m making. I really like these juicy lines.

Then I did the thing I always do in Procreate, which is to immediately forget which brush I’d used. It’s in there somewhere, I’ll find it again I’m sure. I think it was a Kyle Webster Photoshop brush I’d imported at some point. My brush organisation and admin is woeful.

Anyway, I also started playing about with the Tombow Fudenosuke around the same time, and given the choice, I’d more often than not prefer to draw on paper.

It’s a fun pen, with about the right amount of ‘whoops’ in it for the way I like to draw. I’m not sure I’m explaining myself particularly well, but having the ‘right amount of whoops’ feels perfectly intuitive to me. Maybe I’ll talk about it in more detail some other time.

You know that thing where you do a fun drawing and then you happen to have a bag of air-drying clay just hanging about? Well, that happened, so I decided to make clay reptiles with my daughter¹.

I should say right now that these aren’t ‘for’ anything, just the joy of mucking around².

We co-ordinated our tableau - my reptile depicted a passer-by, trying to halt traffic;

While my daughter’s little sculpture depicted a reptile that had inexplicably dropped dead;

Fantastic.

Both figurines cracked to pieces as they dried, so that aren’t exactly ‘presentable’ any more. We might get some polymer clay and take another swing at it all, who knows.

It was fun, trying to take the loose lines from the drawings and try to transpose them into three dimensions. When I think of these characters while I draw them, they have a definite volume that they occupy. When imagining them, I can pretty clearly see them in three dimensions³, so trying to get that out of my head and into some clay was an interesting challenge.

I guess the next logical step here is to take a swing at modelling these in Blender or something. Maybe I’ll do that!

1. Who has a unique and delightful sense of humour.

2. Although, if you are in a position to pay handsomely for hastily produced drawings of reptiles, let’s talk.

3. I have a kind of ‘3d model’ of the things in my head that I can rotate and move around. It’s pretty vivid, and I’ve only recently realised that not everyone has a 3d model viewer inside their heads.