Vanilla Polar Bear

Meet my polar bear with his seal chums! As the title may suggest, I still feel I’m making vanilla work, nothing too amazing, which is disappointing for me. I’m in my comfort zone with watercolours, soft bright colours with not a lot of contrast and a lacking of something-something.

Nothing practice won’t sort out though I hope, I’m going to push in some contrast with more ink in my next illustration, with a touch of pastel maybe to give it a kick! I made this illustration with coffee, watercolour, ink and white pigment and I experimented with drawing gum to make the bubbles!

Dirt and Antelopes

A quick painting of a fleeing African antelope, I want to start concentrating on earthy elements, sprays of dirt, splashes of water, the whistling of the wind! Maybe a little ambitious, but I’m having a lot of fun with pastels and I want to experiment with making my drawings as atmospheric and interesting as possible. I made this juvenile antelope with the usual sploshes of watercolour and coffee with quite a lot of pastel dust, white pigment, ink and fineliner.

Humpback Whale Drawing

In preparation for my next Aesop I drew a humpback whale. I was really excited with this drawing, I really appreciate the whale-y form. To think they were land animals once who gradually sunk into the waves, what a transition! I'm embracing the continuous line technique too, it allows me to be scribbly and true to my human mistakes, plus I think it looks swimmy which works with the subject of the drawing.

Coffee has become quite a heavy feature in my drawings now, there’s a persistent coffee flavour circulating in the air from leaving three day old cups lying around in my room, mmmm… My parents are less enthusiastic, but I’m liking the grainy stain it leaves behind, it boosts the surface texture of the drawing.

Illustration Friday: Onomatopoeia

bee-1.jpg

What a mouthful! So this weeks Illustration Friday was Onomatopoeia (on-na-mat-oh-pee-ah), I immediately thought bumblebee. So I hit Flickr in search of inspiration and I found it in the form of Staffan Hamnäs and his stunning photo of the beastie. I used watercolour, ink, coffee, pigment and pastel to blast this fuzzy bumble with colour.

I think I fussed with detail too much, and prefer the white free version. If you look closely you can just about make out the little white ‘Buzz’ words. I used drawing gum which is a new material I’m getting to grips with, it’s excellent though, you can keep your whites white forever with that stuff. It allows me to be less concerned about my clumsiness and opens the flood gates for my Oddkness — it’s a good feeling!

Illustration Friday: Together

After missing I don’t know how many weeks of Illustration Friday, cutting it a little fine as always — I managed it, just before the topic changed!

For the theme of ‘Together’ I thought about a bustling bunch of Magellanic penguins and for even more closeness I attached the penguins with an unbroken continuous line, how cosy! Then fought with a little bit of patterning, which I then finished with coffee, ink, watercolour and pigment.

I was panicking a little as penguins look quite uniform with not a lot to distinguish one from another, I think I met the challenge reasonably well and managed to injected a little bit of individuality into each little penguin'ite, room for improvement though, definitely.

The Wolf and the Crane

The Wolf and the Crane involves a delicate procedure where a crane attempts to remove a bone from a wolf’s throat. Using coffee, watercolour and a touch of white pigment I came up with two slightly different compositions. I have used the common crane in the first illustration and the sandhill crane for the second due to the geographical compatibility, which I shouldn’t probably take any notice of since this is an Aesop’s fable, never mind!

My second attempt is probably the one I prefer, I enjoy the subtle detail of animals faces, plus I bought some different pens which are waterproof so I don’t have to wait a few hours for the ink to dry, resulting in less Skyrim time in between drying…

“A Wolf once got a bone stuck in his throat. So he went to a Crane and begged her to put her long bill down his throat and pull it out. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he added. The Crane did as she was asked, and got the bone out quite easily. The Wolf thanked her warmly, and was just turning away, when she cried, “What about that fee of mine?” “Well, what about it?” snapped the Wolf, baring his teeth as he spoke; “you can go about boasting that you once put your head into a Wolf’s mouth and didn’t get it bitten off. What more do you want?”

Cosmic Terrapin

It’s been a long couple of weeks of tortoises, and this is the end, I’ve reached the breaking point! No more turtle-y related things now, I promise. I found a really lovely image of a terrapin by Bernadette Chiaramonte on Flickr whilst I was losing my mind trying to illustrate the Tortoise and the Eagle and I wanted to inject my oddkness into it.

Using coffee, inks, watercolour and that white pen which finishes off the image quite nicely, I was able to depict this terrapin, accompanied by a few fishy friends swimming through space. I did mean it to look like water but it looks more like space… but that’s okay!

Blind and the Continuous Line

I’ve been practising some blind drawing of… can you guess? Blind drawing is when you only look at the subject and daren’t look down at the paper which results in some quite interesting outcomes.

These nightmarish images you see below are tortoises of course! The middle image is the results of some continuous line drawing where you cannot lift the pen off the paper, I added some water for a leaky effect if you wondered why some appear to be dribbling.

Squirrely Sketching

I’ve had a super busy week making drawings for an e-zine who may publish my work in their next issue, so I’m being super secretive with the outcomes! I’ve been practising drawing silly squirrels in my down time, and here’s a couple of pages worth of drawings to satisfy your insatiable thirst for more oddkness in the meantime.

A3+ and A4 Prints for Sale!

Yay! I’ve successfully had one of my drypoint horse prints Dutchess I, reproduced. As you may know, I made these back in college for an exam piece and they are my favourite body of work I’ve produced.

To ensure you’re getting a lot of pretty horse face for the money, the actual dimensions of the print is a little larger than A3 and the paper is 477 × 351mm. I also have A4 prints for sale for the more space poor amongst you.

If they sell I will consider replicating more of my printmaking work, and maybe even my watercolour work, and hopefully wean off my checkout blood money from the supermarket I work for.

More British Beasties with Sketches

I have worked hard this week to really make some art I can stand back from and feel that I didn't waste paper. It’s a good feeling! I’m making a portfolio of work at the moment to submit to an online magazine, the theme being dark fauna and flora.

And my favourite image has to be this little fawn, I added the ink trails to add an element of darkness, and I do think the black ink adds a bit of a creepiness to an otherwise innocent creature.

By making sketches beforehand — something I considered time wasting before — I can really develop the final image. I guess practising the form in a sketchbook really helps give me the confidence to push those watercolours to their limit! I feel I’m really getting a hold on my technique and I have been considering maybe a fancy Illustrator or Photoshop package to enhance my hand illustrations further, a pipe dream for the moment, maybe in the future…

Fauna and Flora Beasties

I’ve been interested in combining flora and fauna together as one being. Here is one of my first attempts. Though I am really critical of this drawing I hope to get a little more creative with the flora composition on the beasties to depict a wildly whimsical beast worthy of some more eye time.

I’ve also been experimenting with mark making, so I’ve produced these couple or drawings in the past week, distributing the right amount of dots and triangles as you can see, practice makes perfect!

Getting Creative in Cards

I really enjoy drawing in people’s cards, the thrill of completely messing it up is enormous which is quite stressful, but this stress I interpret as a push to really create something memorable. Using ink in cards is a particular favourite, as using cotton buds you can often remove layers of ink creating tone, I emphasise this by streaking on white acrylic paint. Excuse the handwriting!

Masking Tape Bat

In lieu of my next Aesop fable illustration, I’ve made my own little long eared bat from rolled up tubes of masking tape and carrier bags. I really enjoyed making my masking tape cat when I was at Kingston University, so I thought I’d get the tape out and get busy with making another weird luminous green sticky creature.