Shadows in the rain

Even Cerne Abbas in Dorset, UK was gate crashed by the torrential rain over Christmas, so this week’s drawings are inspired by items of furniture in the hired cottage. The complicated column of a brass table lamp was a definite shape builder test piece. When I got to the base, the drawing of the first rhombus reminded me that I am a cell biologist not an artist. Even if I could work out how to create an Ai perspective grid it wouldn’t have helped me work out the correct angle to recreate what the eyes see on a flat art board. So I drew three guide lines; left, right and front and blundered hopefully on. It’s not quite right somehow.

I was then inspired by the back of a chair in the bedroom which produced wonderful shadows on the wall even when it was raining outside! I created the shadow by copying the chair back then subjecting it to a -5^o shear, 45% reduced opacity and a Gaussian blur.

Colourful Pies

Last week I needed a pie-chart for a drawing of the hair cycle. Pie-charts couldn’t be easier in Ai and once you have worked out that you need the white ‘direct selection’ tool rather than the black ‘selection’ tool to select individual slices, colouring them and creating patterns is straight forward too. The slices then behave like shapes. So here is a pie summarising my work this year which probably isn’t entirely accurate but it is pretty.

I found the leaves and stripes in the swatch library menu bottom left of the swatch panel. I have tried to find a way to make the stripes a different colour but haven’t been able to work it out yet. However, the spade, graduation cap and quill were easy; I dragged my drawings into the swatch panel to create new patterns. These patterns are transparent so I copied the pie segment and pasted in place first so that I could have a coloured background. The rainbow effect is created using the gradient tool and the holiday picture is created by copying the pie segment and placing it on top of a holiday snap and then creating a clipping mask.