opcop creative graphics

pictures, drawings, sketches, photographs

welcome to opcop

These pages are dedicated to, among many other things, displaying elements of an intermittent journey through the realms of sketching and drawing with pencils, both graphite and colour. I hope that over the course of time, I might learn a little, practise more than a little, and make one or two nice pictures in the process.

I draw purely for the pleasure of doing so and have no illusions regarding the quality of my work which is its own reward although one of my sketches has been used as part of the artwork for a book cover. As always, there are too few hours in a day in which to fit everything we might wish to do but making pictures is a good way to spend free time whenever some might be available and other demands are not too pressing.

Over the years, I have acquired too many tools for this small aspect of my life but as they will probably last my lifetime, it is better to have them than to be without. If nothing else, it precludes the possibility of blaming my tools for being a poor worker. With each image displayed, I provide a brief summary of the materials I used to produce it. These are our main toys:

Graphite Pencils: Staedtler Mars Lumograph (8B - 2H), Faber-Castell 9000 (5B - 5H)

Colour Pencils: Faber-Castell Polychromos (120), Staedtler Ergosoft (24)

Watercolour Pencils: Staedtler karat Aquarell (48)

Paper: Faber-Castell A4 150 gsm, Derwent Academy A3, A4, and A5 110 gsm, WH Smith A6 135 gsm

Erasers: Conté soft, Helix professional firm, Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth soft

Sharpeners: Faber-Castell (8mm 23°, 8mm 30°, 10mm 30°), Staedtler (8mm 23°, 10mm 30°)

Software: Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher

'a sketch is not a drawing, a drawing is not a painting, and none of those is a photograph'.

On the navigation bar, below, you will find five clickable links, one each for the Drawings, the Aliens visit page, the Minnies website, the Photographs pages, and the Buchan Nature website which are all part of the Opcop family. We hope very much that you will visit all of these. The Minnies site contains a wealth of cartoons while the Photographs site offers a large selection of pictures taken in many interesting places, most of which are perhaps inevitably in Aberdeenshire. If you are interested in the natural world, then the Buchan Nature site has pictures of every living thing which we have had the opportunity to see and photograph – over four hundred and twenty species and counting – and we do our best to update this with new or improved images whenever we can