Penguins And Company

 A few more pictures from last year for the moment, whilst I work away at other things in the background...

Can you remember a time before the first lockdown? Back in January or February, and the usual art group exhibition was coming up (let's very much assume that is not to happen this year) and I was starting to get inspiration from a few more of my wildlife photos for pictures. (Another reason for doing this did not materialise, no thanks to the virus!) The following two were drawn in this time, though not ones that I chose to put in the exhibition, but they can be displayed here instead.

Ring-tailed Lemur from Jersey Zoo, on A5ish green card, pen, chalk and a little coloured pencil:

Owl butterflies; I must confess I cannot for this moment recall where these were - Jersey Zoo or before? - need to check and edit. I at least managed to convey just why they are called owl butterflies... A5 textured card, pen, with a little colour added in Photoshop:

And now for a piece I was working on during the first lockdown, which I then stopped and hadn't looked at in months until now. Will definitely get back to this again when the time is right. I couldn't seem to get a photo of this where it didn't look a bit blurry and the colour has been sucked out a bit - the many trivialities of drawing on A3 and getting to the online world... Was again keen to do a solely traditional piece and larger, like the anteaters. So this is inspired by a lot of African penguins I saw at Bristol Zoo, and a few different photos I took. For the moment it is just pen and coloured pencil:

Hopefully should be something more to show soon.

New Year 2021

 It's 2021...

and we're in lockdown again. But still, here's to a more optimistic New Year.

As you will see, I've been working on further changes to this site (and others) to shift my creative direction a tad; hopefully for the better. Layout and colour has now changed, supposing I'm still happy enough with the colour scheme in a few weeks. The banner will also change after all these years; I am very attached to my little robot, but as most other things were changing, I thought perhaps an update there, too (not to mention the blog name is now inaccurate).

Let's start off with a wintry - dare I say festive - theme before it gets too late. I don't usually upload pictures I've created for my relatives, but the odd one will be fine! I've taken to creating images with cut out paper and card, kind of making it up as I go along, in recent years to give me something a bit different to work with than usual pen and felt tips/markers. Wonky phone photo alert:

Second, a background piece I did early December, based off a verse from a lovely someone's poem. Sole background pieces I don't tend to do so much and it was a fun little change. Pencil, scanned and coloured digitally:

'...Next, a shimmering purple sent waves of peace, crashing against the black rapids of despair.'

On another note, it was a very much appreciated little boost for me when I saw that in December Creativepool itself on Creativepool Liked my Young Writers' illustration from 2019, and it came up on their front page which I just had to screenshot!☺:

I aim to have a more of a particular focus on what I upload this year, to help me concentrate and improve with certain styles of illustration. (Naturally, pictures shown in this first post are a bit different to one another!) We'll see how it goes...