Shells, Etc. Sketches

Another post was due and hey, look at that, it's December already?? As we face the colder whether your mind will, of course, drift to things like shells and starfish; it's only natural... From one of my art group sessions, sketching various natural objects from two minutes, to five, to ten.

This shell/rock/thingy (why didn't I write notes beside?) was a two minute thing, but I wasn't satisfied with it and so have since added more tone and the charcoal around it.

A piece of tree bark? Drew it twice, one a two minuter and the other five (needless to say because it is written on there already). The extra difference is use of pencil in one and charcoal the other, to allow for more tone.

 

Pinecones are rather tricky to get the shape looking right when some of the inside is exposed, meaning you don't just get the straightforward shape. Five minutes of dissatisfaction... but I don't mind it so much now.

 Definitely a shell! It had some pretty lines of colour which I couldn't add in then but nod to now. Think this one was two minutes? Sketched with running out pen.

A large shell, five minutes and a quick attempted angle change in two minutes underneath. Blue pen because who said it all had to be black and white?

 

Sam Starfish is in a rush!

 

And the same starfish again. but on the opposite side which I discovered was a bit more interesting (I could not face drawing it for ten minutes). As you can see, I got a bit carried away and inverted the colours and added a slightly spacey feel.

Let's see if I can get another post in before the new year!

Expecto Patronum!

A few weeks ago I discovered (it's a Harry Potter thing) my Patronus -- a basset hound. So I was inspired to draw her. Bit of fun. Sketchily drawn straight onto Photoshop.

(So so glad I didn't get a salmon, or a spider, or something like that.)

I've also, for the first time, been doing 'Inktober' and loosely following the daily prompts. We'll see later on whether I feel they're worth posting on here or not...

Horse In Motion

What's this? Another post so close to the last? Loose brush strokes painted on to textured card in an attempt to give an impression of the horse in motion. Need to draw more horses to ever improve on getting their anatomy right!

Dolphins, Bubbles, And Sea

A few months back on a holiday to Tenerife I had the opportunity to go on a boat trip and (possibly) see some dolphins and whales. Sadly we did not see whales, but we did see quite a few dolphins - and one turtle! - which was a great experience, anyway, to actually see them 'in the wild'. We even got quite a few showy jumps from them. So I was inspired to create a dolphin picture. I made a rough biro doodle in my Sudoku book (as you can see from the picture below with the grid marks showing through) and decided I should colour it. I started painting it, yet found that I had virtually no blue, so it was more greeny and didn't quite work out. Next, I created a pastel version, which only half worked (and again not enough blue...), so I cut the dolphins out and placed them on blue card and added some sea/spacey swirls. My final version was scanned and digitally coloured, retaining the original marks. Here you are just seeing my pastel and digital versions. I might do a larger dolphin piece at some point, but happy enough with these for now.

Didn't photograph too well, but you get the idea:

The best of a lot of attempted photographs of these fast-moving animals as proof.

Lotsa Dogges

More coloured up doodles. Dogs are always a good one to draw with the sheer variety of breeds to explore.

Hopefully have some more to upload soon. Not necessarily dogs...

C Is For Cat And Cheetah

Been a while since a proper update! Been busy with some illustration and so on. Hope to get more created and up soon. Also giving the blog a general summer clean, so it's somewhat more up to date!

So for now here's two sketches I drew at some point and decided to add some colour to in slightly different ways.

Cats are fussy:

A kind of portrait:

Thanks for looking!

Giant Anteaters

"Giant yourself, mate"

An A3 piece I did a couple of months back, again inspired by photos from my Dallas Zoo visit. Roughly based on a diddy photo I took, with quite a bit of addition, such as the second anteater. Black pen outline and coloured pencils. Note that the quality of photo isn't great; the colours are much stronger in reality.

Rabbit On A Swing

Spring is here! Not that you'd quite know it yet, weather-wise. Another picture inspired by an old photo. Created this quite a few weeks ago and I'm thinking I should now just post it as it is Eastertime... The photograph taken has faded it a tad, but hopefully you get the idea. Coloured pencil and pastels.

Elephants In Motion (And Humans)

What else was in my sketchbook? An evening with wildlife artist Susan Lees last September. She got us to watch a short video, on a loop, of moving elephants, and we had to select one or two to try and capture the motion of. I find such exercises quite hard to get in the flow of and I get frustrated how backwards my sketches suddenly seem to look (deconstructing my way of sketching is useful, of course!). However, the artist did have a good word to say about some and I did keep going, so not all lost! Looking back now, I can see that they're not that bad after all, and so here we go:

...

 ...

And a few figures drawn at another evening... March, apparently. Ah, need to draw some more figures soon!

Posting again soon.

Ruffed Lemurs On Show

Well, were on show. My framed, exhibition piece displayed at Nature In Art. Took one of the photos I (or mother?) captured at Dallas Zoo back in April last year for inspiration, with the idea of the ruffed lemur sat upon a rock and the other one appears to be waving... I drew it first on yellowy textured paper, which unfortunately quite a lot of the effect is removed when scanned, but you can still just about see a hint of texture. As you can see I coloured it lightly and sparingly on Photoshop to create an overall illustrative look. (I didn't colour it traditionally because I wasn't confident it would work out how I wanted.) I'll certainly do more like this, as it does combine a few illustrative methods which I like.

And like last year, I was an artist in residence for a few hours. Wasn't sure what to do, so took a few more of my diddy Dallas photos with me and loosely scribbled from those. Tried to relate how I created them with how I created the lemur picture, but with handy coloured pencils instead. That manatee was such a funny big blob. He pressed his face against the glass reaaally close to me and as he swam/floated around he kept holding on to this plank of wood.

Scanned some other sketches from my book while I was in the swing of it, so will post them up soon.

Cat and Wolf

Something digitally finished again. Doodles from a little while ago which I felt deserved colouring up. :)

Exhibition is underway...

Another Year, More Pics

It's 2016! I've had this blog since about 2009. So many years seem to pass since university...

I realise I seem to have vanished from here in August. Here's a few pictures from the series I started (in previous posts) which I meant to upload in the last few months. Something to start the New Year with until I get some more new stuff together.

 Another image inspired by a photo of myself, my sister and mum on a France holiday in 1999. Guess who's the bunny. Coloured pencils (and marker pen for the black) on coloured paper. It's so dark in reality, but I quite like how it turned out.

Another photo inspiration (for a school art project, originally). I felt like changing 2002? me to a period piece with an 1800s lady. Black pen and white pastel on coloured paper.

Diddy purely pastel image of a unicorn in a cave-y area with a waterfall. Again, rather loosely based off a photo. Well done if you can make it out. I took a photo of it so might as well pop it here, too.

In other news, I've had a few illustration projects to do and hope to have some samples up before too long. Also, I will again be having some work on display for the art group. Now what to use...