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.

Illustration Friday: ferocious

RAWR!:

 (watercolour, A5)

I really wanted to follow the topic and draw something mean, dark, ferocious even, but for some reason I just couldn't think of anything. I must be having a creative block in terms of dark subject matter. Hmm, worrying...

At least her hair looks fierce.

It felt good to do another watercolour, I've been trying my hand at oil paints and it's been hit and miss (mostly miss). I think I miss the speed at which I need to paint with water-based media. Oil paint is great for blending and reworking but you need patience. Oh, and cleaning up afterwards is tedious.

(BTW I suck at creating characters)

As you can see I was going to try and draw a cartoony cat. That didn't pan out, but cute kid in a cat costume did. The ball of yarn was an afterthought, as the kid looked odd bearing her claws at nothing.

As usual my initial sketches are weird-looking. While others go into great detail and produce reams and reams of ideas, revisions, revisions of ideas, I usually doodle a few things in pen on a tiny scrap of paper (those are A6 sheets up there!) then transfer it onto the final paper. Thankfully my paper is very forgiving as this is when I end up working and reworking the pencil lines. I know I should do proper sketches beforehand but hey, it's not easy to change, especially when it works for me.

While I wait for a painting to dry...

...I broke out some white Conté crayons and decided to do a quick portrait. Unlike most of the portraits that I (attempt to) do in black on white paper, this one was reversed. Slightly different process, I think.

(White Conté crayon on black paper, A3)

This time I tried to keep it sketchy instead of smoothing it out too much, otherwise it starts to look too unnatural. That said, I've noticed that when I try a portrait, I usually end up drawing the eyes much bigger than they are supposed to be, thereby making it unnatural anyway. Hah. I guess that's my thing then. I must really like eyes.

Good hair day

I know I'm not good at portraits. I also know that I'm not too good with oil paints. So why I combined the two, I don't know.

I used painting knives instead of paintbrushes because I wanted to experiment with creating texture this time around. I spent a lot time on her hair, where all the texture was. I started to paint her face and upper body with a knife as well but it wasn't translating well. By the time I decided to use paintbrushes, the paint already began to solidify and so the textures have stuck. I'm not too fussed, we'll call it 'character'. Anyway, I'm not going to pretend that this was going to turn out like a portrait from an Old Master. It was just me moving a load of thick paint on the paper.

Bumpy...

Illustration Friday: swell

 Water, water, everywhere:

 (oil paint, A3-ish)

I thought I'd break out the oil paints and try to paint water. This photo came out a little bit too bright though. The paint was still wet when I snapped it (I stopped painting about 10 minutes ago) and the wet paint reflected some light in a few odd places. I still need to fix some parts, like the background water and especially the breaking wave which, for some strange reason keeps coming out square every time I paint it, but I thought I might as well post now. After all there are only a couple more days until this week's topic is done.

I'm also determined to actually finish this rather than call it a WIP and then forget about it like I did with my first few oil paint attempts. Hooray for me.


(Only after I chose my "water water" intro line did I decide to look it up and find out that it is actually a line from a poem called "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I didn't even know the poem existed until now. Hmm, you really do learn something new every day. Thanks for that, Google.)

===
Update, 17th August:
Photos don't seem to do the painting justice. Either the colours are wrong, light is reflecting off it and creating different effects, or there isn't enough light (damn you, English summers!) My first photo (up there) included a few details that aren't actually in the painting but enhanced the image somewhat. So I painted in some of those artifacts and, thanks to a great tip in the comments section I repainted the breaking wave to look less square. I changed the background water as it was too busy and repetitive and the shade of blue right in the distance seemed artificial. This is how my painting looks a day later. I retouched it slightly in Photoshop to get the colour levels as close as I could to the original painting.

It's getting there.
I plan to repaint the sky next. The blue doesn't feel right.

Destroy

(Update, 6th August, 2011: Also submitted to Illustration Friday for the topic 'imperfect')

Kinga's and my personal illustration project is a little overdue, but I'm done. This time it's my topic of choice. I decided to break the pattern of monosyllabic words thus far and chose 'destroy':

(acrylic and pen, A3)

This was a weird one. It started off with a photo of a swan that I'd taken a while back. I thought to myself "it looks too clean...".

I started off in a painterly style, and the water leant itself quite well to it. Part way through I was watching a TV documentary about Impressionist painters, notably Monet and Renoir. I was inspired by it and made the water even more brushy-looking than my usual style normally dictates. The swan didn't really lend itself too much to a painterly style however. I wanted the appearance of fine details so I drew them in with white Posca pen. This gave the swan's body the suggestion of feathers, rather than looking like a milky, washed-out blob. It also made the swan pop out from the watery background, which was a nice after-effect.

After the first pass it looked like this:

I could have just finished here and called this something like Swan #1, but seeing as the topic was destroy and this had no kind of destructive quality about it, I had to go on.

The next step was to sketch a rough piece to overlay. I had a few choices for what word to use. I could have just went with destroy but that was way too obvious (and too long). I could have gone the corny route and used something like style or urban, but those feel like buzzwords used by the media when they portray or describe graffiti. Instead I went the more 'intelligent' route (sure...) and went with mute.

Why 'mute'? Because the swan I painted is commonly known as a mute swan. Makes sense now, doesn't it? I used the typical "dub" style of chrome in black. It's simplicity is in contrast to the complexity and roughness of the painting. Opposites are good.

Silver pen. Shiny.

Nothing like the juxtaposition of a majestic swan with a line of graffiti on it's side.

Illustration Friday: remedy

I got the poison, I got the remedy:

(watercolour, watercolour pens, ink, A4)

Take 2 happy pills and call me in the morning.


I just realised this is the second watercolour I've done in this kind of style, the first one was for a previous Illustration Friday topic. It's definitely not the first time I've used broken white lines. I like it. I think I might adopt it as my go-to style. Wait, have I finally found my style?

I doubt it...

Last Donut of the Night

I was supposed to start painting my idea for Kinga Bee's and my illustration project, but I got side-tracked by this round piece of cardboard.

 EXIF says September 2010

Primed and ready to paint after 9 months...

If I remember correctly this was a random piece of packaging from the box of an electric kettle. When I first saw it the customising cogwheels in my head kicked in and I thought donut. So I primed it with gesso, with the intention of painting it to look like a donut. When it had dried I put it in a box and forgot about it. Then last week when I decided to start another painting for some reason the cardboard donut sprang to mind.

Two sides to a donut

The design was partly inspired by Stones Throw's Donut Shop, a 2 disc vinyl LP of J-Dilla tracks that has slipmats designed to look like donuts. I decided to paint a donut on each side so, if you feel like a strawberry glazed donut you can pretend to eat the glazed side. Or if you're in the mood for some sprinkles, the sprinkles side.

Donuts for the eyes and ears.


Doughnuts, donuts. Whichever you prefer. They are both tasty.

The choice is yours...

I had a bit of a sound trip with Black Sheep's The Choice Is Yours not too long ago, then I found this video. Great concept, and funny too.

"UHH! C'MON!"

Illustration Friday: asleep

Sleepy cat, sleepy cat, why won't you go to sleep?

(watercolour, 23x31cm)

The sleeping kitten is Kara. I named them Kara and Mel, like caramel, because they're both orangey-brown coloured and siblings. In the original photo they are about 3 months old. They both lived in my family home in the Philippines. When they were older we gave Mel, who ended up being called Kulit (annoying) to my aunt. She did indeed live up to her new name.


Only later on did I realise that Kara was actually a tom, but the name stuck. He's still known as Kara but I call him Karabao, like carabao. I think it's better for him to be named after a docile beast rather than a cutesy sweet treat.

This is Kara in December last year. He's about 1 year and 4 months here.

Still sleepy as usual. Of the 2 Kara is much friendlier. You can easily pick him up and he doesn't mind. He often climbs up onto my lap to take a quick nap. Kulit on the other hand was always wary of being handled, even approached. Good thing we gave her away.

When he's awake and fully alert he is a beast:

We used to have mice living in a pile of wood in the garden. I think he caught them all.

Illustration Friday: soaked, part 2

Another one, this time with colour. What a day to forget your umbrella:

(watercolour, 23 x 31cm)

At least her feet are dry...

Illustration Friday: soaked

Seeing how the end of the world hasn't panned out today, I might as well post my entry. No colour this time:

(charcoal, A3)

Third portrait in a row. Still not brilliant at doing them, but they are fun to do.

Maybe the hellfire will come later...

Shhh!

(charcoal, A3-ish)

It's oh so quiet.

Earrings

(charcoal, A3)

Keeping it sketchy.

rush

If you saw my previous post then you might recognise this. Part something in Kinga's and my personal illustration project. Lady's choice this time, her topic was rush:

(acrylic paint on canvas, 60cm x 51cm/24" x 20")

I mentioned way, way back in one of my old posts that I had a blank canvas and an idea for a painting. Well, that never surfaced and I moved the blank canvas up onto a shelf. When I was given the topic rush back in March (1st March to be precise, I still have the text message... Wow! That was a long time ago) my initial ideas were to do with being in a rush, velocity/speed/moving too fast etc.

(detail)

A few days after the topic was announced I was sitting at my computer when all of a sudden a memory popped into my head. Nothing weird about that, you might think. People think about random stuff all the time. The problem this time was that it was a memory that felt very real but at the same time didn't make any sense. It felt incomplete and I tried as hard as I could to figure out what it was about and what the missing parts of the memory were. Do you know that feeling you get when you have a word on the tip of your tongue but you just can't seem to say it? As if it's there but it isn't? That's how I felt except it was a memory. For a good 10 minutes I sat there baffled, trying really hard to make sense of it, as well as figure out if what I was thinking was real or if my imagination had pieced together a bunch of different memories together and made something up. It's really difficult to describe in words the actual thing that I was trying to think of, and reading this back looks like the ramblings of a madman, but at the time I was really confused, definitely freaked out and actually a little upset. The next day I didn't care any more and the details of the memory were hazy. Strange...

(more detail)

After that weird episode my idea changed from being in a rush, to the feeling of a rush. A head rush, if you like. It also (for a different reason) made me finally paint on the canvas. My first revised idea was a person screaming with their head split in half and a whole mess of crap spewing forth (my memory) but that felt like it was going to be too complicated to do. I eventually refined that idea into what you see now. There's still a whole mess of crap but it's a much more organised mess.

First, I sketched my idea on tracing paper with brush pens. They were nice to draw with and I liked the blocky colour and sweeping qualities I was able to achieve with them on the smooth paper, particularly with the black outlines. It was like painting with a slippery paintbrush onto Teflon. Shame the paper was yellow though.

It wasn't possible to translate the brushstroke effect with paintbrushes. Yes, that seems like a contradiction, but it was because I was using acrylic paint which, if you've ever used in it's basic form, absolutely LOVES to dry out after a few minutes and fluid strokes turn into smears after a couple of passes. I tried thinning it with water but that made it too runny and transparent and I wasn't going to buy a retarding agent just for this. I ended up using a black UNI Posca pen instead. This made the black outlines less brushy and more graphic. Not what I intended to do but a nice (and probably better) compromise. The rest of the chaotic details (arrows, stars and other assorted bits and doo-dads) were drawn with black and white Posca pens. Posca pens are my new favourite thing. The name is also fun to say. Posca Posca Posca...

(from tracing paper to canvas)

I was going to paint the background black and flick in some white paint to make a white-to-black gradient, but that seemed like too much hard work. I then painted over the black with green and dark blue to introduce some colour but it was so transparent that it looked I just painted on black all over again. I ended up mixing the blue with white and that killed the transparency. Having a colour background meant that I could outline the figure in black, instead of outlining in black then highlighting it in white.

This took about 2 weeks from start to finish, on and off. Mostly off. It probably would have taken about a week if I didn't dilly-dally and keep screwing up. The most time-consuming part was obviously the details, but it's the details that makes this interesting, so I didn't want to rush (ba-dum ching!) them. Painting over failed colour choices also didn't help. Good thing I didn't do this in oil paint, I might still only be half-way through.

I'm not really happy with the eye, so I might work on that some more, but I guess the emphasis is supposed to be on the crazy hair and the patterns rather than the face. Also the face looks better in my first sketch, but the hair looks better in the painting, grr. I haven't signed it yet (hence all the watermarks), I don't know whether I want to sign it with my normal arty "squiggle" or tag it. I'm leaning towards a tag as the style of this is graffiti-based, but I don't know which tag to use. I might just sign the back of the frame. Decisions, decisions.

I have since tried to remember what the subject was that was lost in my memory, but it's just a vague recollection. All the details are gone and the urgency and confusion I initially felt is no longer there.

On a lighter note, after I painted the hair I suddenly had a craving for rhubarb and custard sweets.

Yum.

I didn't give in.

Enough with the wall of text. Enjoy rush.

(Click here for Kinga's take on the topic)

Just an idea...

I'm trying something different here, but with a familiar style. Hopefully this doesn't turn into another one of those pictures that I don't finish because the idea was too difficult for me to make a reality. I hate when that happens.

Illustration Friday: bottled

Yeah, you know the deal:

(pen and pastel on paper, A4)

I added a vignette to darken it somewhat, the original image scanned way too bright. It also makes the image look old, which is a pretty neat effect.

original

detail

Dots, everywhere dots.


Update: I also found the first doodle I made when this week's topic was announced:

This is usually how I put my idea down before I completely forget it: really badly on a scrap of paper and in ball-point pen :)

Cat in a hat

Another quick portrait, 20ish minutes, #3 (I think) #4

(charcoal on paper, A3)

I should draw more light-haired people.

IF next, that's if I can get the idea from my imagination onto paper.

Woodkid - Iron

I don't normally post videos on here without including a drawing I've done myself, but I just caught this video today and sat back and watched in awe for the 3 minutes 45 seconds it ran.

Full screen is a must.

Illustration Friday: duet

Two to tango:

(watercolour, A4)

:)

Obligatory WIP's...

NOW!

Yup, I got extra with the stretching and used masking tape on top of butcher's tape. The paper still buckled, though not as much as with previous stretching attempts. Something must have went right this time.

Afro

Quick portrait again, in a similar vein to my others (take a reference picture, grab some charcoal, sketch fast, ignore the details). I did this one because the afro is spiffy:

(charcoal on paper, A3)

The proportions are off (the face should be bigger and turned much more to the side) but that wasn't really my concern. I just wanted to draw fast. If I tried to draw it picture perfect then there's really no point in drawing it (/self disclaimer). Again, about 20 minutes on this, maybe 25 with colouring the afro.

The reference I used was of Marsha Hunt. She used to rock a cool afro in the '60s and '70s. Pretty too.

And finally a closeup photo, the full shot doesn't really pick out the different shades of black and grey too well.

 

I might get an A2 pad, A3 feels a little small to do these kind of drawings...

New banner

This blog has been bannerless since it's creation. I've just been using a simple text dealy, and it's only now that I decided to make one. Long, I know. I wanted to draw something today but I had a bit of a creative block. I ended up playing around with photoshop instead.

Look at my awesome handwriting!

The background is a photo that I took of some Staedtler Triplus fineliners, tweaked to death in Lightroom and Photoshop. I haven't even used these pens yet, they're still fresh!

Colourful!

I may end up changing it as looks a little bit sombre, as if this blog is about death poetry or something equally dark. But for now it stays because I'm tired and I can't be bothered to change it. Using PS was fun though, even if half of the time I didn't really know exactly what I wanted.

Also the "My world is blue" bit is from the song that I referenced in the very first post of this blog.

Dope song.