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!

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!

collage: it's a fashion nation

When I'm not feeling so great, I sit somewhere with scissors and a pile of stuff and cover myself in art goop. It makes me laugh to think how many materials I used on this. Paper punch, magazine cutouts, acrylic paint, masking tape, washi tape, clear gesso, regular gesso, PVA, white ink, Neocolor crayon, stamp ink and a brush pen to lay down my almost invisible signature.

'It's a fashion nation'...and a terrible pun.

Don't mind me, just checking out my imaginary closet...

new project - comic!

A friend of mine approached me with a proposal - he would write a fantasy comic and I would draw it. I can't say much about it just yet except that it pays well, I am very excited about it, and it involves a lot of research into the Baroque period.

Yup, I could not resist a silly joke stolen from Beauty and the Beast.

Some notes on the distinguishing features of the Baroque (not Rococo!) period.

With a slight, sloppy digression into a Benedictine abbey.

Hannibal sketches: draw the rude

Some things I have been doing: packing, getting hooked on the Hannibal fandom (I was already sold on the show), and spending more time with my mom before going back home to London.

I am not a horror or a gore fan, but I love murder mysteries. Silence of the Lambs is one of my top five all-time favourite films. Still, the TV show is even more stressful than I expected!

One coping mechanism I have is eating food that will ensure the Gentleman Cannibal will want to murder me but won't dare eat me, for fear of dying of cholesterol, sodium, or sugar. The other is speed-sketching.

Drawn with Pentel waterbrush and Sailor Profit Brush Pen (expect a post on this soon!), with Noodler's Bad Blue Heron ink in various dilutions.

And one more quick sketch:

Not a real scene from the merboy story, just a piece of fluff: Fionn teaching Hyacinth to read out of one of those 'fairy tales from around the world' books that I had as a kid. Pentel waterbrush, etc.; plus Koh-I-Noor Hardmuth brown lead with Cotman watercolours for the background.

some things I have been doing...

Here is a preview of some things I have been up to.

Sketches and drawings in various notebooks, with various fountain pens and brush pens, captured by iPhone camera and saved to Evernote for the most part.

Egg salad recipe

Whenever I visit my mother, what we love to do is eat. One of our staples! (Please forgive the scan; this notebook doesn't open very well.)

Noodler's flex pen and Inktense pencils in Winsor & Newton heavy cartridge sketchbook.

drive by sketches, 1

So I haven't posted for a month. This doesn't mean I haven't been drawing, just that I haven't been drawing for myself. I was getting a little frustrated, being busy with the new job and one or two projects that aren't going quite the way I wanted them to. And then I found this:

An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration from the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators and Designers. This is a sequel to An Illustrated Life, a book of artists' journals, and I really wanted that...before I saw this.

I borrowed the book and have been reading through it the way I usually don't with these books. When I own them, I reach for them casually, flipping around pages, browsing and stopping wherever I want, hunting out favourite artists and ignoring others. I am going through this one like a proper book, reading from beginning to end, discovering artists and styles one by one.

I love travel journals and always wanted to do one, but have never had the time while I was travelling. Italy, Singapore, New York, all failures; I was enjoying myself too much rushing around to sit in one space and patiently commit it to memory. Looking at this set something loose in my resolve; I am now living in one of the most beautiful and famous cities in the world and not drawing any piece of it. In the end the frustration was too much. If the only travelling I do now is on my bus ride, then I will draw my bus ride.

So here it is: day 1 of the Drive By sketches. Begun on my best friend's birthday! Copic .01 micro liner in a Scout Books pocket notebook with a lemur on the cover, by artist Meg Hunt. I'll scan it for the next post.

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.

page a day: coffee

I love every way of brewing coffee: single filter, Mr Coffee, capsule, espresso drip--but siphon coffee turns me into a little kid at the Exploratorium, watching science turn a morning essential into an alchemical ceremony. And delicious coffee, of course.

Pentel brush pen, fountain pen with Noodler's ink.

Update on the book project: I spent today drawing things. Spanish combs, flip-flops, wooden slippers, headbands. I love it!

Altered States

In a stunning reversal of previous practice, I've actually been doing a lot of work lately without posting.

Stay tuned for:

• more of the Sketchbook Project (which has already been sent off to Brooklyn)
• pen scratchings and painting updates
• more Jonsi Project scans
• text-only updates on the Big Book Project which I should be done with in April but isn't scheduled to come out until around September. Oh my God, a real published book all to myself!

In the meantime, I am still doing the altered book art journal, which you may remember from these posts: (first spreads; single pages). Here are some better scans, as well as new(ish) pages: