Dogtober 2020

So here is Dogtober, the other list I did for October. As explained in my previous post, this challenge was originally for August - 'Dogust' - but I did not find out about it until later on. A chance to draw a few breeds I've never drawn before. Like Artober, everything was drawn traditionally, however I did later colour one of the pictures digitally and might possibly develop another digitally at a later date. As you'll see, there is a few different styles and some are much looser than others. I've combined drawings and left some on their own for a bit of variety. Even doing that there's still rather a lot to upload and display...

1) Samoyed - pencil, coloured pencil and watercolour on acrylic paper.

2) Shar-Pei - charcoal (on acrylic paper); 3) Dalmatian - running out fine line pen and marker pen. At this stage I wasn't sure if I was going to go rather realistic with them all or not and this one was clearly drawn with Disney's 101 Dalmatians in mind.

4) Bulldog - brown felt tip.

5) Mastiff - pencil. Right, so this one has a story behind it and one I was so glad to find: Back when the Battle of Agincourt - the great English victory over France - was fought in 1415 (actually also in October) one of those Englishmen who fought was Sir Piers Legh. He was injured mid-battle and as he lay injured, his dog, an early form of the English Mastiff, protected him throughout the rest of the battle. What a brave, honourable dog. I took this idea and gave the dog a bow and arrow to defend with, which he is clumsily trying to hold, to add a bit more fun to the piece. It's quite loosely drawn, particularly in the background, as I keep intending to come back to this at a later date for further detail and colour, with some Mediaeval art inspiration. 6) Finnish Lapphund - running out felt tip pen and coloured pencil.

7) Pug - marker pen; 8) Beagle - pencil. 

9) Poodle - pencil and watercolour or ink?? on acrylic paper; 10) Norwegian Elkhound - running out felt tip and pencil.

11) Chow-Chow - watercolour, acrylic and coloured pencil on acrylic paper.

12) Greyhound - charcoal; 13) Boston Terrier - fine line pen.

14) Border Collie - Initially pencil and then gone over in pen and coloured digitally.

15) Akita - running out black pen. A story behind this one, too: In Japan, mid-20th Century? a man had an Akita which would meet him at the train station after work. Tragically the owner died, yet the dog would still come to the station every day to wait for him for the rest of its life. Saddening story. My take ended up being what I know much better - a British train station. Also some honestly! purposeful strange perspectives going on here. 16) German Shepherd - pencil. Bit of a joke here.

17) Icelandic Sheepdog - marker pen; 18) Malamute AND 'Strive' - pencil, watercolour, coloured pencil and felt tip on acrylic paper. This is the missing #18 from Artober which got combined because I thought the dog looked like it was striving somewhat.

19) Labrador - pastels; 20) Saint Bernard - marker pens.

21) Keeshund - fine line pen and marker pen. Drawn with my left-hand because it's fun to try when I remember; it gives a look that you just wouldn't get with the normal drawing hand. 22) Husky - felt tip and marker pen. Ended up looking a lot like the character Aleu from the Balto sequel. 23) Shiba Inu - felt tip and coloured pencil. By this time I'd got a bit fed up with drawing dogs with curled tails.

24) Corgi - coloured pencil; 25) Eurasier and 26) Jack Russell Terrier - both with running out felt tip. The pocket idea was inspired by the 'Puppy in my Pocket' toy craze of the 1990s. I do like a nod to nostalgia.

27) Pomeranian - pastels; 28) Dachshund - coloured pencil.

29) Great Dane - coloured pencil. I kind of wanted to draw an actual Great Dane, but then Scooby Doo came to mind; 30) Rottweiler - marker pen.

31) Golden Retriever - ink, with a bit of digital correction.

Phew! glad that's all sorted. Is this the time to say I've been working on 'Catvember' this month? My own personal list, drawing some well-known cartoon cats, and possibly one or two obscurer ones. These challenges are so, so useful to do. Maybe it's ambitious to do something every month, but certainly I should aim to do more than just in October. They encourage more art, obviously, thinking of ideas for words that I may not have drawn before, and also to use art materials that don't often get a lot of use or I'd really like to finish up (I dislike throwing things out until I've used the absolute most of them that I can). Hope anyone viewing has liked to see these!

Artober 2020

Back in October I took part in not Inktober, but Artober - a more personalised list for a smaller group to work from, and it also meant that I didn't need to stick to just ink. As with every year I've done a challenge list for October, I'm not worrying about doing something super-detailed. I want to have some fun without any worry. It's also a good chance to use some materials that aren't in great condition and/or need using up. I've bundled most of them up so as not to have 31 images to click through. Some scanned and some taken with camera phone. Every picture has been created traditionally. Hopefully it's fairly clear what's going on with the pictures without going into detail!

1) Pumpkin - coloured pencils; 2) Sparkle - pencil.

3) Fuzzy - (hardened!) watercolour and marker pen; 4) Bicycle (my word choice) - watercolour or acrylic and coloured pencil.

5) Trash - marker pen; 6) Wander - watercolour. Simple idea to have pawprints as if a cat has been wandering across the page.

7) Mountain - charcoal on acrylic paper; 8) Gift - pencil; 9) Breathless - pencil. Got a little inspiration here from a well-known Corrs song.

10) Grand - inks on acrylic paper. Who needs a smooth brush, eh?...

11) Dizzy - felt tip; 12) Drenched - felt tip and coloured pencil.

13) Blocks - inks; 14) Tiptoe - pencil; 15) Blue - watercolour on acrylic paper.

16) Feast - felt tip. I had some fun with this; 17) Hound - marker pen.

18) Strive... not here? We'll get to that a bit later...; 19) Crowd - inks. My one reference to this year; 20) Handle - fine line pen; 21) Brave - pencil.

22) Wings - charcoal; 23) Basket - felt tip and coloured pencil; 24) Glow - inks. Inspired by the original Disney Beauty and the Beast. Yellow ink looks more orange...

25) Clamber - coloured pencil; 26) Pint - pencil. Lord of the Rings-inspired.

27) Harvest - fine line pen, marker pen and wash. Had quite a strong sudden inspiration for this one: a combination of a nod towards my university final film "Not I" and a childhood memory of wearing these masks (I had the pig mask) to celebrate 'Harvest' in Infant school (do children still celebrate Harvest at all?) - albeit in a far less intimidating way - both to do with the traditional tale of 'The Little Red Hen'. And lastly it gave an added Hallowe'en theme. It's tempting to animate this idea sometime. 

28) Dusk - pastels on acrylic paper. May not give an obvious imagery for 'dusk' but was fun arty stuff to do, nevertheless; 29) Laugh - fine line pen. 

30) Switch - marker pen. Of course these things aren't nearly such a taboo now, but this brother or boyfriend? is not keen; 31) Buried - watercolour and acrylic? on acrylic paper (a bit of charcoal travelled over to it later on), Suitably Hallowe'en-y ending.

Thanks for taking a gander at these. And that's not even it. For every day of October I was also taking part in Dogtober - as renamed by me. I found out too late that there had been a 'Dogust' challenge for this year and I wanted to take part. The more to draw, the merrier... Will post my drawings - in a very similar fashion to this - within the next few days.

Cats Cross-Stitch And Misc

 There hasn't been a lot going on here recently and this is the main reason:

Regaining an interest in cross-stitch, I bought this in about 2018, started working on it, then stopped, and did not pick it up again until August of this year, finally finishing a few days ago. It was more complex by a longshot than any I have stitched before and most satisfying. Now I didn't design this myself, but as something creative-crafty I have worked on for so long, I think I can allow this on my blog. Note it has not yet been ironed, nor edges tacked down.

~/\/\/\~

Now for something quite different - a few more traditional abstract-y pieces working on a very limited colour palette. It got me thinking about what people who are viewing my blog want to see, and maybe it's not these rougher, scrappy pieces so much. But then I thought, well this is my personal 'creative endeavour' blog, after all, and if I want to do things like this sometimes as an alternative to pencil sketches, digital colours or so, and post them if I feel I'm getting something out of them, then why not? I like to do a bit of loose painting; I like to use up old, hardened paints. Neater work will happen again another time!

'You Do Not Get Away With It'

'Eat your...'

''Im's After You, Kid'

'Trees'

(courtesy of a stump of a 'Burnt Sienna' watercolour tube)

'Snakes Forming Together A Bit Octopus-like'

'Watching'

Didn't seem to title this one... Vortex?

'Barricades'

(WWI-inspired)

'Emergence of Swirls'

(Okay, so there's felt tip in this, too)

'Pond'

I think it's clear I particularly had some old brown and purple acrylic or watercolour to use up. All pictures on acrylic painting, just under A4 size.

Next post in a day or two...

Dangerous Dragons

Some recent dragons pieces. Somehow every few months or so it comes back to dragons.

First, a suggestion by somebody that did actually inspire me enough to take it further: a nun versus a dragon - with ruler in hand as a weapon. I wanted it to be quite dynamic posing, drew it on A3 and at an angle, which I would then keep as I scanned in and pieced back together the drawing. After some deliberation of how I would take the drawing forward, I decided to keep the original pencil sketch as I felt that to go over in pen would kill the dynamism of the lines - and I'm pleased I did keep it so. I also got in my mind to give it a bit of an old comic book panel look, and as well as the pencil I retained the grains of the paper left when it scanned, hoping it too would add to the effect of the piece.  

Soon after that I worked on this interpretation of Smaug, the dangerous, gold-loving dragon from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit after having watched back through the films. Quite simply and lightly drawn in comparison to the former piece; however, like the other, the pencil line was retained, scanned and pieced together and the paper marks utilised further with some parts even left uncoloured to give a kind of old, tatty book appearance. The piecing together of the picture after scanning gave a very convenient centre-fold. It didn't take very long to create and decide this piece was done, which can be oh so pleasing when you have other pictures that require quite a bit more time. 

And that's enough dragons for the moment...

Anteater Update

Little giant blog update. In 2016 I drew some giant anteaters on A3 paper, yet was never fully happy with it. I think it was just before lockdown I decided to work into it some more, left it again, and then came back to it at the start of lockdown. I'm far more satisfied with it now and it echoes my exhibited 'animal illu-art' pieces better now, with it's use of more sketchy lines. I've attached the original post for comparison, not that that picture was ever very clear (and come to it, even this recent one isn't perfect on colour vibrancy) - but hopefully an improvement can be seen.

Original:
https://franscreative.blogspot.com/2016/04/giant-anteaters.html

Nothing wrong with going back to an earlier drawing and bringing it up to date once in a while!

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Also should mention I've been tidying up my blog recently, even renamed it slightly, and am in the process of updating my pages at the top of the blog for some well-needed freshening up. 

Life Drawing Off The Telly

In May, TV channel BBC4 had a lockdown Life Drawing special. Thanks for that – what a great idea! It had a few different models with a variety of poses and varying lengths of time to draw them in. I liked the link to classic art pieces in their poses and the inclusion of some kind of clothing in some cases to give a theme. This is the kind of thing I want if I'm life drawing these days, to inform my own art a bit more. As this was taking place in the living room, I wasn't going to risk paints and pencil and charcoal (firmly staying in my hand) were the main tools here. It's great to see more arty programmes the last few years – particularly Sky Arts' Portrait Artist of the Year. 

In between the human life drawing, I also had the privilege of a smaller life drawing opportunity in the form of a cat (later, also another), and so amongst my human drawings below are a few cats. 

The usual 'I'm really out of practice!!!' start with a bit of a duffer. This wasn't helped by not realising the camera was going to turn away from the pose just as I started, and then a frantic working out how to access the red button on the new remote control. So unfortunately the initial short poses were missed – aside from the scribble above. 

Screwed up the arm and just couldn't pull it back. I'll be honest about it with the blackened scribble.

Messed up proportions, but what a great pose with instrument!

When I remember what self-admiring Greek myth art piece this is based off is, will edit. 

Pose choice based off 'Liberty Leading The People' by Eugene Delacroix.

So I certainly felt out of practice with it, but nevertheless found it fun to do. Fortunately we have the earlier non-lockdown programme recorded, as well. (The way the show is edited, it is much better to do it 'live' – too late! – but I reasoned I can just pause the TV when it goes to the model and still draw for the length of time they suggest.) I will be able to do some more again soon.