Illustrated envelope fun time

So, when the theme is a glamorous Pre-Oscars party, and you have a birthday card with an unbelieveably boring envelope and a box of felt tip pens, you obviously customise the envelope. Obviously!

(felt pen on... an envelope!)

From cruddy ball-point sketch, to pencil outline, to fill in.

I should have stopped there, but the back was as dull as the front was before I got my grubby mitts on it, so I did a little Googlin' and found some images of the official Oscar envelope design, for a little inspiration.

The back of the official envelope...

...and my humble little homage/rip :D

Any excuse to customise something :)

Flyin' rats

A couple of pigeons. The first was done in watercolour:

 I spent an hour, maybe 2 (on and off) total on this one.

The second pigeon was a really quick pen sketch and coloured with grey pencil as I don't seem to have a grey pen handy... Oh wait, just as I finished typing that I realised I have a grey Alpha marker but that's alcohol-based and I used water-based ink and hey look, I'm going off on a tangent:

I spent maybe 5 minutes on this one. I didn't outline in pencil beforehand and I'm pointing this out because it's something I rarely do. It's scruffy as hell and I didn't finish colouring in the green-purple feathers because I didn't want to over colour it, even if I undercoloured it. But for some reason I prefer this scruffy, unfinished pidge over the planned out and full colour pidge.

Funny how that happens...

Braid

Just a quick 'n' dirty sketch. Haven't used plain pencil in a while, I'm rusty.

Back to painting, I think...

New Year

Woops, I haven't posted in a while. Happy New Year and all that jazz... Anyway to get back into the flow I'm posting a painting that's nearing completion:

I started at the end of last year, then came the holidays and the Christmas period which naturally meant it was put on the back burner. But it's nearly finished. It still needs some touch up work, some flowers don't look like flowers and the table is a little flat, otherwise it's pretty much done.

I have another canvas which is begging to be painted on... I just need to decide what I'm going to put on it. I wanted to do something graffiti-based, but it's not easy to emulate the style with paintbrushes. I could use spray paint but I decided that I'm not going to splash out extra on a bunch of cans when I have a ton of oils and acrylics, plus my can control isn't that good. Ahh, decisions.

I'm thinking about changing this blog's colour scheme. Dark greys and blacks are easy on the eyes and blue is one of my favourite colours, but it's not exactly a "happy" overall look.

I also plan to post more sketches and other ideas, rather than just posting final pieces. I need to get back into a sketching/doodling frame of mind, regardless of how crappy I think they'll turn out. If the Mayans and other wacky prophets are correct this will be my last year to ever post here, so I might as well take advantage of the time we have left :P


Roll on, 2012.

Duck and cover

(watercolour, gouache and pen, A4)

Here's a Mandarin Duck. I was going to draw a Mallard but the vibrant colours of this duck are too good to pass up.

I haven't done a pencil drawing in a long time so this was going to be a pencil drawing. I started off with Inktense watercolour pencils, but because I only have 12 different pencils my colour pallette is really limited. I changed my mind part-way through so now it's mostly watercolour paint and a little gouache.

Watercolour is quick, which is probably why it's my go-to medium (I do get impatient sometimes). I will do a drawing soon. It's been a while, I might have forgotten how to use pencils.

Mariposa

(watercolour, gouache and pen, A4)

More gouache, although you can't really tell.

Fishfish

(gouache, watercolour and pen, A4)

My first try at using gouache, a totally alien medium to me up until yesterday. It was actually really fun to use, it certainly made my fish look good. I can see why illustrators like it so much.