Category: Pen Ink - Cavanagh Art

Okay, so I totally missed July

12/8/2021

For 2 reasons: 1) I've been preoccupied editing our June Holiday videos and; 2) I totally forgot about the website. Apologies.

Okay so let's start with the artwork then; which requires us going back to May:

St Pope Paul VI.

First off is this watercolour of Saint Pope Paul the Sixth that I did as a Memorial Card for a friend's Priestly Ordination at the end of May this year (2021).

Pentecost 2021.

Then we skip back a week, or so, to Pentecost 2021 for this quick, unplanned sketchbook drawing. I'd been pulling my hair out earlier struggling to do something for Pentecost digitally and it wasn't working out, and then just before, say, 10 or 11 o'clock that night I made this with a black, blue and red ballpoint pens with text highlighters as well. You don't always need fancy stuff to make art.

St Charbel Makhlouf.

And now come to the missing blog month of July with this watercolour of St Charbel Makhlouf, Maronite monk and priest, and a patron of Lebanon.

At the moment I don't know if, or how long, this "pure watercolour" (ie, no ink outlines or such) style is going to stay. I think, on reflection, that it came about for 2 reasons: 1) during a conversation with a family friend whose eyesight is not what it once was, I realised that some of my more ink-heavy pictures (such as St Joseph and the infant Jesus) had no real clarity.

St Joseph and the infant Jesus (2020).

I knew what I was looking at, but someone with bad eyesight couldn't untangle the mess of black ink from the sometimes equally dark watercolours; and 2) I'd been watching some watercolour demonstrations on Youtube (link here) and there was one where the instructor painted an picture of Santa Claus, for a Christmas Card, in with just Red, Yellow Ochre and, I think, Payne's Grey or Black. So that was an added impetus to change my style: I wanted to also try painting a face with just watercolour. And that is the condensed set of reasons why I painted Paul VI in watercolour (see above).

Now as I mentioned earlier in this post, I've been, and I am still working, on editing and uploading our June Holiday to South Australia videos to Youtube. If you want to see where we went, I've put the first (in no way chronological) video at the bottom of this blog post. As of 12 July 2021, 12:49pm, there are 3 South Australia videos up on my Youtube channel (link here), with much more to come.

So until next time (barring me forgetting again!) God bless and stay safe.

Late Night Sketching

20/4/2021

Lately I've been participating in an online tuition course for Blender 3D, which has been a good if somewhat challenging experience. The challenging part being trying to work in a group with many other students in multiple different time zones (and the associated late nights that come with it), but I'll talk about that more in a later post. Sometime in May. Hopefully.

Below is the sketch that I made last night to release some of my creative frustrations:

Christ Pantocrator (2021).

I just needed to do something religious to make up for my recent lack of any such artworks.
The original Christ Pantocrator (roughly translated as "All-Mighty" in Greek), that is the inspiration of this image, is one of the first icons depicting Jesus in early history of the Church, and remains to this day a very important image in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
It depicts the two natures of Christ, being both fully God and fully human, through the different sides of His face.

Below are the mirrored composites of the left and right sides of my rough sketch:

Pantocrator Blessing, Mirrored.

Pantocrator Gospels, Mirrored.

Honestly, I had no real plan about how to mirror this image, I just had the vaguest of recollections of what a Pantocrator Icon should look like and I went from there. So I sketched in out with blue ballpoint pen and went over it with a water-based black marker, and added colour with text highlighters. In hindsight I really should've either scanned or at least taken a photo of the under drawing, but I decide to let it go and just keep on drawing with the black marker.

The one real difference between this sketch and the Icon it's based on, is that the real Pantocrator doesn't have the wounds of Christ in it, as far as I know.

So, until the muse next takes me or I need another outlet to create, God bless and stay safe.

Year of St Joseph - Part 2

19/4/2021

Continuing with St Joseph, here are the 2 most recent images that I have done. Both of them where created with Copic alcohol-markers and water-based pens, with pencil under drawings.

"Most Chaste Heart of St Joseph." This one was made on the first Wednesday of March (2021), because every first Wednesday of the month is dedicated to St Joseph. This was an opportunity for me to do the Chaste Heart of St Joseph justice as I'd only previously done a very small version for CATHOLinktober, Day 19, "Chaste Heart of St Joseph". It was also a chance to try out some Bristol Pad paper that I'd bought earlier.

"Reunion." Showing the reunion of St Joseph with Jesus after the crucifixion and before the resurrection. This was painted in honour of the feast day of St Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin (March 19), after having the haunting last few words from the poem Limbo by Sister Mary Ada running through my head that day.

Here are the last 2 stanzas from that poem:

And there He was
Splendid as the morning sun and fair
As only God is fair.
And they, confused with joy,
Knelt to adore
Seeing that he wore
Five crimson stars
He never had before.

No canticle at all was sung.
None toned a psalm, or raised a greeting song.
A silent man alone
Of all that throng
Found tongue --
Not any other.
Close to His heart
When the embrace was done,
Old Jospeh said,
"How is Your Mother,
How is Your Mother, Son?"

Until next time, God bless.

Year of St Joseph – Part 1

8/4/2021

Back in December 2020 Pope Francis proclaimed a Year of St Joseph (8 Dec 2020 – 8 Dec 2021) for the whole Catholic Church.
More information about it can be found here, and about prayer to St Joseph here.

Below are the first 3 images of St Joseph that I painted in the Year of St Joseph proper:

"St Joseph and the infant Jesus." The starting point for this image was the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 1, Verse 20; which was one of the prompts from the #Adventus202One art challenge during Advent 2020.
This image in not exactly of the moment described in Matthew's Gospel, but rather of a moment after Jesus' birth when St Joseph fell in love/accepted Jesus as his son for the 2nd or 3rd time.
Also the main inspiration for this image was the idea: if St Joseph had a beard before Jesus was born, how much of it would have been left after Jesus' toddler year (ie. pulling part of Joseph's beard out)?

"The Holy Innocents/The Flight into Egypt." This image was also another inspiration from #Adventus202One, this time being close to the scripture reference: Matthew, Chapter 2, Verse 13–15.
The inspiration for this was thinking about how the recently departed Holy Innocents may have processed with the Holy Family in their flight into Egypt from Herod's persecution, all under the protection St Michael the Archangel.

I just sketched this one rather quickly on some coloured paper and inked it with a calligraphy marker and text highlighters, because I just wanted to get it done and I didn't care how I got it done.
I'd been getting sick of doing so many watercolour pictures in a row and I wanted a break from that medium.

"St Joseph, Protector of the Holy Family." The title for this one basically explains all there is to this picture. Showing St Joseph as the Protector and Shield surround the Jesus and Mary.
Although I must not forget to acknowledge and appreciate @awememento's influence upon this particular painting of St Joseph and the Holy Family.
And her Etsy page can be found here.

Until next time, Happy Easter!

First Assignment

16/9/2020

The first assignment for my 3 month mentorship under Giuseppe Castellano was to research the illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé.
He is still alive, and known for loose ink work, real life settings, minimal colour, recognizable but not perfect depictions of people (for example children have light bulb shaped heads and adults have big noses). Then I needed to reference his style in a mock up of a cover for the New Yorker magazine, including the interaction of two characters and a background.

This is one of my pages of practice sketches.

The next thing was to research covers for the New Yorker magazine. Most of them contained scenes from New York life, or what would be recognized as New York life, or else they were political. At times the spine and mast-head were colours other than black.

So I researched New York, things like 20 things only New Yorkers would appreciate, or 10 jokes only New Yorkers will get. I needed to find either a humorous angle or something I am interested in. The stories of YouTube sensations Pizza Rat and Milkshake Squirrel were intriguing.

I put together some thumb nail sketches:

1. Pizza – Rat: Going to the Cinema with Dad.
2. Abbot and Costello on TV with child watching.
3. Father and child on a Ferris Wheel at an amusement park.
4. Child peering over subway platform to see train.
5. Child chasing after parent in front of giant destination board.

Of these thumb nails, Pizza – Rat won. This is a scan of the ink work, below.

The next step was to get an idea of colour values digitally before putting any watercolour on.

Then came watercolour. This is the raw image below:

I then had to clean up the art work and remove/fix mistakes from inking, in Photoshop.
And then add the copied masthead from a previous New Yorker cover, via Google and Photoshop again.

This final art is shown at a smaller size than actual size.
It had been quite a while since I used non-digital media, I had forgotten how nerve wracking it is when there is no room for mistakes.

#IllusDept #mentorship #Sempé

sketchbook rambles

31/7/2020

Much of what I have been working on during July hasn't been finished yet, so I have decided to share with you a bit of a ramble through my sketchbook instead.

The first one is a series of sketches of Bishop Stumbers from which I started building an animation. That animation is far from finished, but there is a draft version of it on Instagram (@cavanaghcreative). In it you see Bishop Stumbers walking along engaged in social media activities on his phone, until he walks into a wall, recovers, and continues tweeting etc.

The second one is of a coffee addicted robot, or coffee-bot.

The last one is a new character in a classic heroic pose.

I've also been working on a 4 part comic strip, but it is only about 70% completed. Each part is 3 panels wide. I'm currently wrestling with how best to share it online because Weebly displays vertical and square images much better than horizontal images.

Since April 2020 the regular emailed newsletter has been in hiatus. For the last few years the list of whom we send it to hasn't been growing, in fact it has shrunk a little due to deaths here and there. Given that no one has been asking why it is missing, it seems to be the right decision to let it lie fallow for a while until there is a good reason to re-start it, eg some very positive news to share.

inktober 2019

29/10/2019

Inktober for 2019 is almost over, apart from the drawing I am working on now, there are only 2 more black & white Socket Head drawings to go.

It has been a worthwhile personal discipline, but whether it has had any additional value remains to be seen. I doubt I will attempt it again.

Here are a selection of 5 drawings from the series:

From Day 15, theme 'Legend'

From Day 16, theme Wild

From Day 17, theme Ornament

From Day 22, theme Ghost

From Day 24, theme Dizzy

The rest of them you can see on my Instagram (@cavanaghcreative), Twitter (@VJCavanagh) and Facebook accounts.

socket head's latest adventures

30/4/2019

Sometimes you just can't keep a good character down.
Socket Head has been out and about......

First stop is playing board games with Sailor Jim:

Then someone, possibly you, left him at home, alone and unsupervised....

Then there was that time when Socket Head wanted to return a gift of inferior workmanship:

And that time when he went shopping:

He has also been to see the chiropractor and the podiatrist,
but those adventures can be shared next time.

sometimes life gets in the way

13/7/2018

The month of June 2018 was a tough one because it contained the last three weeks of life of my paternal grandmother, and her funeral. During that month, life was anything but normal. You can read about her life here, which contains footage from an interview I did with her a few weeks before her health really declined, which I edited later.

Things went very quiet on the creative front, but I was able to catch up to the 52 weekly illustration timetable earlier this week.

The theme for Week 21 was Haunted House, for which I deliberately wanted a limited colour palette. Yes, it does have a bit of an 'Adams Family' vibe.

For Week 22 the theme was Spectacles, which this teddy bear is wearing in a haphazard way.

Cottage was the theme for Week 23, and if you look carefully you will find that a small creature has made a cottage-home on top of the much larger swamp creature.

With the Week 24 theme of Anatomy I decided to have some fun. This well dressed frog was off to a very exclusive soiree when his plans were interrupted by some students of animal anatomy, and he very much wants them to get it over with so that he can resume his evening plans.

Because Week 25's theme was Nursery Rhyme, trying to choose one out of the many was proving to be difficult, so I combined three of them. Thus we have the mouse up the clock from Hickory Dickory Dock: Little Bo Peep with some of her sheep stopping to have a look at this sight; and Humpty Dumpty also surprised by this unusual view.

If you don't want to wait for the next blog-post to see Weeks 26 and 27, Facebook and Twitter are where you should look.

sebastian's sink city

27/7/2016

I am just about ready to submit the second set of artworks for assessment to the London Art College's correspondence course D6 Illustrating Children's Books.

Of the set, the second part is a major project, a double page spread.

The brief went something like this: Allow for a text area taking up about 1/3 of the left hand page. Sebastian is seen to either build or find an imaginary world under the kitchen sink. Make it detailed with a cartoony edge, and use good contrasts of scale. Allow a 30mm border between the trimmed edge of the page and the start of the text. The text was not supplied.

Here's the layout idea from my sketchbook:

And my pencil roughs:

The next part was to add the ink.

And then add a bit more ink, increasing the lights and darks and adding more detail.

Next I took some photocopies, and used coloured pencils to test my colour arrangement ideas.

It seemed like having minimum colour on Sebastian made for a better flow from text area to city, and made the city the feature of the double page spread.

Now to begin the watercolour work. Masking fluid first. For this part it was easier to take photos rather than scans. I started with the browns and beiges.

Then came some blues and greens.

Followed by yellows and reds.

Then some skin tones on Sebastian, and fine tonal detail. The little people still need colour.

Here's the final raw artwork, with the bleed area still present.

Now to stitch it together with Photoshop and remove a few minor blemishes.

And what it would look like with the 5mm bleed removed, in a picture book.

And lastly, how a bit of text would look.

I'm very pleased that this project is finished. I enjoyed it, but it took a lot of work to complete.