oh look, another mermaid

Are you sick of fish ladies yet?

Actually you might know this one: I drew it ages and ages ago and have only just come back to colour it.

In the meantime this physical artwork (and the sketchbook it's in) has been in three different continents since I created it. It's the John Watson of watercolour art. Think of that as you look at it. You're welcome.

Inkscape inkspace

I don't think Inkscape is something I 'taught myself' so much as I just fell into it with a burning resentment because my computer can't handle Illustrator right now.

But I'm starting to feel my way around it a bit better, and there is nothing on earth anymore that YouTube won't show you how to do.

So a relative asked me to do some work for the banner header of their personal blog and they wanted an arrow with a pen nib point. 

Some sketches I did:

The designer came up with some pegs for me, to streamline the process. A dip pen point instead of the fountain pen, a burnished antique look.

This is the first thing I did off of one of the pegs from the designer: a Roman pen. She wanted it for the arrow shaft.

This is the final illustration:

Fashion Sketches: Superdry Girls

It is literally unbelievably hot here in London (I'm not joking; people are going round saying they actually don't understand how this can be the same place as last year), and that means mini dresses. I keep looking at the adorable dresses on the Superdry website, even though I know I'm not going to buy them. And then this happened:

I actually did have a pet rabbit who looked like that, I don't know why I am so mean. Poor Sei-chan, at least you're alive and well and happily adopted.

(The stains are because I was painting in the garden, and then I took my teabag to put it in the compost and splash. I tried to make some drips so it would look deliberate, but that only made it worse.)

I thought 'well the higher classes seem well represented, what about merchants and workers'? I like the fishers and their nautical stripes. The textile merchant...everything looks fine except that wimple. You can't even tell that's what it is, her head just seems like a separate entity. Maybe it's her la-la-land expression.

So this exercise was more satisfying than actually shopping for Superdry, but not as satisfying as I thought it would be. Oh well.

New banner header!

I was a little tired of doors (shocker!), and I thought the blog header looked untidy, so I made some banners from my dirigibles art.

I used a neat little free font called Stamping Nico that I got from dafont.com. Picked the third banner because it had a little more colour & variety. Hope you like it!

Happy Birthday, Mom!

It's my mother's birthday today, so I did her a watercolour! Unfortunately I have no scanner at the moment, so here is a photo instead.

Cotman pan colours on Daler Rowney watercolour paper, with Sakura Koi and Blue Heron waterbrushes.

(Edited 7/15/13 to replace the blurry photo with a clearer one.)