small pleasures

Taking a break from digital watercolour to post some small things I've been doing in traditional watercolour as loosening-up exercises. The School of Life recently released a little card pack called Small Pleasures, and I've been painting my favourites.

1. Feeling at home in the sea. I used a technique called 'spontaneous painting' by YouTube artist The Mind of Watercolor. Winsor & Newton Artist watercolours.

2. Figs and lemons. Staedtler clutch pencil, Winsor & Newton Artist pan watercolours and watercolour markers.

3. A book that understands you. I love painting people reading! Kuretake brush pen and Cass Art professional watercolour travel set.

There's quite a few cards in the set, so there will be more of these soon!

learning and sketching

I've been working on my facility with digital art lately. I may be most comfortable with creating work on paper and then painting it digitally, as I'm doing for a current project:

Watercolour brushes and techniques from Kyle T Webster!

My Bamboo tablet and Photoshop are my tools of choice, although I've seen amazing work on Corel Painter, Paint Tool Sai and a relatively new open-source program called Krita.

But I'm still most comfortable with pen, paints and paper. Sometimes you are seized with inspiration and need to get something on record RIGHT NOW. A digital illustration still takes me many hours and a lot of equipment. So when, for example, one of my favourite actors appears at my place of work and I want to commemorate the experience...

I still grab my notebook instead of my tablet. I do hope to be equally quick on the draw with both someday!