Charles Robinson RI

While on holiday recently I found myself rummaging around in a second-hand bookshop and came across a book on the work of William Heath Robinson but as we were running late I bought the book quickly and left. However, when I finally had time to look at it more closely, I realised that the book showed the work of the THREE Heath Robinson brothers, Thomas, Charles and William. I hadn't realised that there were three of them and that they were all successful illustrators!
The first image in the book that took my breath away was a watercolour portrait of someone called George Parlby produced by Charles Robinson (he seems to be the only brother not to use the 'Heath' in his surname for some reason) which was a study piece he produced to become an RI. You don't see watercolour portraits so much these days and so I thought I'd have a go at producing a copy to understand (as best you can from a printed page) the way he would have layered the watercolour etc. It took me most of yesterday to paint but very enjoyable none the less. I hope Charles will forgive me for plagurising his excellent work......

The Now Show

I like listening to the Now Show (Radio 4, Friday night) mainly because of the humour of Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt. Below are recent quick caricatures I did of them both:

Hugh Dennis



Steve Punt

I wonder why we don't see that much of Mr Punt on the telly?

Foghorn cover

This is the cover I drew for the latest issue of Foghorn. My attempt at getting back at those neer-do-wells in ThatLondon..

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Visualisation

I was recently asked by a Management Training organisation to spend a day with a group of Interantional HR Managers who they had spent the last 9 months working with as a group on various HR projects. I was asked to join them to help visualise their conclusions to enable them to present these to various invited colleagues later in the day.
In the morning I spent about 20 minutes listening to one group and started jotting images down in a small sketchbook (which I gave them at the end of the day). Here are a few of my scribbles:





These images (not all those I drew during this period are shown) won't mean much to you but it does show my 'quick' style.

I was then asked to help the various groups produce images to assist them in their presentations (rather than use PowerPoint) which I don't have copies of to show you here. What I then did, during the group's presentation, was to take 'visual notes' i.e. I drew images that just 'poppeded-up' into my head while they were talking which recorded the various points. Below is a (rather poor) photo, taken using my phone, of the end result which took about and hour and a half (?) :

Holiday (brielfly)

Liz and I spent a few days at a Landmark Trust property (Wilmington Priory) with some friends last week and so I took my sketchbook along as usual and tried to do a few drawings in the time available.
The first is of our bedroom - well, a view from our bed, which I didn't have time to add colour to..



The Priory had very nice shutters on the windows and so one afternoon I thought I'd draw them.



I then decided to go outside and have a go at drawing the old Priory....




It was good to spend some time with old friends and catch up with what's happening. Our friend's daughter is one of the fine ladies of the Puppini Sisters - Kate and her boyfriend are just such good company and they joined us for a few days. She'd only just flown back from LA after spending a few days at a recording studio over there. Ooooh the people I move and groove with daaahling.....

Commission

Occasionally you get a request to quote for some artwork or other and the other day a request came in from a manufacturer who required approximately 160 individual pieces of artwork which were to be completed in 8 weeks. The images were to be of either London landmark buildings (drawn in a cartoon style) OR caricatures of famous Londoners or Olympians. For you non-mathematicians out there it's a matter of producing three images per day, 7 days a week! This isn't allowing for amends or re-draws of course! So, I decided to have a go at drawing two such London buildings (from photographs unfortunately) to see just how long it would take me.

The first was the London Gherkin:



This took about an hour. The second was St Pauls Cathedral:



Which took a couple of hours at least.
I sent the client a quote (substantial) and suggested a turnaround time of at least 12 - 16 weeks. I heard nothing back......

Dubai trip

I was recently booked to work for Samsung for four days at an event in Dubai and I thought I'd force myself to keep some sort of visual diary of the trip. With this in mind I spent some time at the airport (who doesn't these days when flying!) and did these two drawings:



I suspect that the pen I was using was too fine. Anyway, here's another one:



I eventually arrived at my destination and got to my hotel. Now, because of a breakdown in communication with the client I unfortunately spent most of the next day in my hotel room but I very quickly learnt to have a rather loving relationship with the air conditioning system. So much so that I sat in that room and drew it so that you could see the a/c vents!! The air vents are clearly visible at the upper reaches of the far wall - I found them unnaturally attractive by the end of my visit even if they were rather noisy.....



I should point out at this stage that the midday temperature outside the hotel was about 45 degrees C and so it was with great trepidation that I made my way to the top of the hotel and stand (in a shaded viewing platform) to draw the Dubai skyline. It's a very complex view with a hotch potch of small buildings shoved into any available space. I just concentrated on the the main buildings.....



The large sail-like building in the distance is the Burj Al Arab hotel which is a 7 star establishment and I was informed by the taxi driver that they won't even let you in unless you have a reservation there!!

The final drawing I'm going to share is the inside view I had of the Airbus 380 which I've never flown on before. A rather large plane with rows of three window seats either side of a central row of 4 seats (10 seats per plane row) and, after watching all the movies I fancied I started to draw this image just as turbulance struck the aircraft.... you'll notice that I ommitted the window seats on my right hand side as I was starting to suffer from exhaustion after my four days of working!



Not a breathtaking series of images I agree but my excuse is that I WAS on a working trip and it was just far to hot to wonder around the place!