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!

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!

fashion sketches

Drawing with coloured pencils and spot colouring with watercolour.

Note The Gap.

Chainmail skirt.

Daler-Rowney Art of Giving watercolour pencils, Cotman pan watercolours in A4 cartridge sketchbook.

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.