Mushrooms

A warm-up exercise that turned into something in its own right. Inspired by this post on Colossal.

Pencil, various pan watercolours. Lettering and borders,
Noodler's Lexington Grey in extra fine fountain pen.
Fabriano small artist's journal.

Drawing objects: killing time or filling time?

Things I draw between projects:

Nothing cramps your drawing style more than not drawing. Usually I like to go through old mail-order catalogues or magazines, or rifle through my photo folders, to find things to draw.

These days you can find lots of things to draw on Pinterest, like vintage book covers.

Don't be upset or discouraged when your drawing doesn't come out the way you imagined. Keep drawing!

coffee: how do you take it?

'actually I feel like every day is coffee day' ... because it is.

Mitchell Copperplate nib (because I wanted to complicate my life), Jorg Hysek fountain pen ink. Note on this ink: it is not waterproof, and it smells like grade school paste. Regardless, I love it. I do wish I had a Jorg Hysek pen to put it in, though, because those things look like props for Star Trek.

pots & pans: cotman compact set

When I first arrived in the UK and was giddy with the high of being in London again after 5 long years HUZZAH, I may have staggered into the London Graphic Centre during a summer sale and bought a set of watercolours for less than £10.

The Winsor & Newton Cotman Compact Set is actually one of W&N's most downmarket colour sets. W&N is the everyman paint company, and Cotman is its budget brand for students.

Still, some of my best work was done with really cheap kids' paint--Golden was the cheapest, but Prang tempera is still one of my favourite art materials--so I was excited to give it a try.

Since I got this set I've used it pretty often, as you will have noticed in the past few posts. It's not as waxy as Prang but just as bright. It comes with 14 colour pans, but you can also buy individual colours. I swapped out 2 pans, because I am a little bit crazy about Prussian Blue and Payne's Grey and cannot conceive of leaving them out of any art set if I can possibly get them.

Because of the construction of the box, though, I can still pack the Chinese White and Pale Cadmium Red in the saucer that fits in the thumb space (seen here clipped to the side). I can even fit my mini Sakura Koi waterbrush (thanks, Mom! ♥) in the central groove, alongside the surprisingly usable synthetic brush that comes with the set.

One word of caution though: I had to fix the pans to the bottom of their trays with dabs of blu-tack, as they tend to pop out and spill everywhere and are a pain to sort out again. The paint blocks eventually stick to the trays with use, but I helped them along by wetting the bottom of the blocks and sticking them down, like votive candles. Otherwise, this is a really cute little box that is a pleasure to use!

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:

page a day: the (human) stain

 

I'd wanted to experiment with this method of colouring for a while but I didn't get a chance to do the blotchy parts till today. It's pretty hard to control, and I didn't at all expect the way the shellac-infused inks interacted with the water-based ones (see: ugly spots in top illustration). 

I quite like the way the latter two illustrations look, but it still seems lazy to me. This could be my weak Photoshop skills, too. Well, back to work.

page a day: let there be light

Mail-order catalogues: the perpetual answer to the question 'What am I going to draw today?'

Visconti ink, Cretacolor aquarelle pencils.

the secret life of things

 More catalogue silliness with the pathetically non-solid Cavallini & Co. ink.

The chairs, the chairs of CB2. Lots of pipe legs in watery ink. The fake rattan weave texture was really fun to draw.

And done in the equally shitty sepia ink, my J. Alfred Prufrock tribute. Actually I drew/painted this whole thing oriented vertically, and only noticed it looked a lot better rotated 90% left. (Or, as actually happened, tossed it randomly on the bed and saw it looked better in passing.)

I would love to turn this second one into a postcard, or landscape notebook, or some other item of stationery.

strawberry flavour

Two of my contributions to hitRECord for their project 'Strawberry Bootlaces'.

This site's pretty fun--Joe is not a man who likes to wait around when he has an idea, so you usually just have a few days to bang something out before he hands it over to the animators. So far the most frustrating thing is not having a tablet or a proper version of PS that allows you to load a layer as a selection for transparency. But it does give me some unexpected ideas to run with every so often, and I need that lately. I've been getting sluggish.

let's try this again...

Starting an open blog so people can keep up with daily doings. It's nice to have a journal that other people can read--will encourage me to keep a more regular record.

So to start out, here is something I've been working on lately...technical drawings for machines. Now that I'm fairly comfortable with human figures it's time to brush up on other things. (Admittedly the recent Bat-madness has had something to do with it...)

The bike is a Kawasaki tourer. :)

As for news: Neil Gaiman is coming for a Blackwell Halloween event! And there will be costumes!!! My friend/manager Sarah Tilley and I are thinking of going as Batman and Batman Beyond. More on this as it happens.