tis the season...

...to wrap up warm.

Other people dress up for winter, I dress for a space flight to an ice planet. This is the regular version; the snow day version adds a coat that looks like a duvet Slanket, an interstitial fleece layer and polar boots with ice grips.

Created with layers in Photoshop and animated in Clip Studio Paint Pro.

nature sketching - spring to summer

This spring has been very productive for diary sketching! I got a little serious about hanami and kept a log of my favourite cherry blossom viewing locations.

Every year is also a search for the perfect cherry-blossom-pink ink...and I think I've finally found it! J. Herbin's Bouquet D'Antan is a pale dusty pink that is a delight to draw infinite flower petals with. Put it in a wet drawing fountain pen like a Lamy Safari and watch it go. I found I couldn't stop drawing bunches and bunches of them.

All these flowers and the twittering birds returned from the long winter made me miss our garden at home, and I drew some Philippine garden birds in a small Fabriano notebook I'm using as a colour sketch journal.

Sailor HiAce Neo pen with Kiwa-Guro ink,
Cass Art watercolours

And more recently, as the cold days clash with the hot, there have been some lightning storms that were wonderful to watch. It's hard to draw lightning at the best of times, let alone from memory, but I just had to get those images down before they faded.

Winsor and Newton watercolours
with white Kuretake graphic paint

This has been a very pink post, apropos for spring. Looking forward to summer!

Mermay!

It's Mermay! Springtime is a good time to turn over a new leaf.

This year instead of just doing mermaids, I wanted to use concepts that made me think of mermaids. Hair. Tails. Weightlessness. Allure.

I didn't go as deep as I do in Inktober, but I'm pleased with the results.

Various Platinum and Kuretake pens in expired Moleskine planner/diary.