A little family of 5 goldfinches were feeding and exploring outside my window this morning. They were rummaging around in some rough ground, one was outside my window playing peek-a-boo. They’re small birds but you can see they have a lot of attitude. They wandered around for a few minutes then as a group they just walked off round the corner. I managed to get a photograph of one finch and drew a quick sketch with watercolour pencils.
My dogs are usually nearby when I’m drawing or painting. I make a cuppa, they get some chews and we all settle down together. I have dog beds all around the desk so my feet are always cosy. Sally also pokes her way onto the seat behind me. And sometimes Lily gets on the desk. There is a lot of mischief at first – Lily likes to play with my stuff, flinging the odd pen or bit of paper. Then she’ll settle down for a snuggle and look out the window.
So here we have a work in progess shot with Lily “supervising”
And here’s the finished picture.
For an art theme of energy, I present the iRat. A rat grimly struggles to drag his battery-powered mate onto the charging pad for a re-charge.
You could read all sorts into this – maybe I was trying to say something about Apple device battery issues, or predicting some grim society where even the rats need a virtual buddy. Truth is, I just had this image pop into my head with a rat dragging his mate by the tail, started laughing and doodled it.
This is a tiny A6 sketch using watercolour pencils and ink on some card. The colours came out softer than I’d have liked, but they still work.
2015 was my first Inktober. The challenge is to draw something in ink each day in October. It’s really useful if you want to improve your inking skills or draw more regularly. The official website is http://inktober.com. I posted daily uploads to Twitter, Flickr and Pinterest, so if you follow me on those sites, you’ve probably seen these pictures already. Continue reading
The walls round my desk are painted in a colour perfectly named “happy yellow”. I have some lovely shelves stained dark and covered in books, notebooks, many bottles of ink, paint and other goodies. They’re just above my computer so I rearrange things and change what’s on display to keep it interesting. Some things are there to make me smile, my supplies are close and lure me to play. There are books I want to read and a backlog of journals and notebooks remind me to write too.
An A5 watercolour cartoon illustration. That moment when your cat suddenly realises it didn’t quite manage to jump onto the table. You see a range of expressions followed by the denial face as they swiftly exit the scene.
I sketched the idea for this cartoon a while ago, and thought it would be fun to work it into a cartoon illustration. After playing with different pencil sketches of the composition, I simplified my doodle and the final composition focuses right in on the birds.
I haven’t used fine liners for inking before, I prefer brush and nib strokes, but it’s fun to play with a different outline style.
When you break jewellery, it isn’t always easy to repair. I enjoy recycling and up-cycling, it’s a creative challenge with an earth-kind bonus. Especially when you loved the original piece of jewellery. Continue reading
Two more drawings from my sketch book. The first was a close up of a squirrel eating. Around here the squirrels seem to divide their time between eating food, burying food, performing acrobatics to acquire food and playing daredevil with other squirrels and cats. Probably trying to guard their food! I wish these were red squirrels but I find it hard to dislike grey squirrels in London, they are such entertaining little creatures. Especially when they perform acrobatics above our garden at full speed.
