It's September and this is the first drawing I have done this year. I will sometimes do 20, but this year is a tough one. After losing my dad, I wasn't motivated to draw or do much, but this summer I was inspired by some work my friend Mike did based on photos he took on the London tube and some video tests another friend did in Paris. This image is not like really any of my work in that it isn't an isolated subject (I think 18 figures in this one) and it's a "full painting," meaning, to me anyway, that it’s a fully realized environment and composition - not one plain or stylized background.
It was a bear to get started. I bought a new iPad and the new Apple Pencil and Procreate had updated over the year a bit. This meant that nothing worked like it had, and I spent an 8-hour day swearing and being frustrated as a menu popped up blocking my work every time I touched the screen, and the pencil kept randomly switching from drawing mode to eraser mode, and I would constantly erase the work I had just done. I had to adjust the program settings and the pencil setting on the iPad end to get it all working again.
I used a paintbrush for 90% of it and didn't obsess over making people look too realistic and instead tried to capture their expressions and body language in a looser fashion - something that has always eluded me. I drew it on a 30-inch canvas, so it's pretty big. I don't try and get all the details perfectly even on the train cabin. I did add a little refinement in Affinity Photo as Procreate is lacking in some of those features, but if I took those out, you really wouldn't see a difference. I think I captured the experience of looking into a passing train and not seeing everyone in there clearly defined. Some of the figures are sort of mysterious, and I like that.
(detail)
