Squawk Squawk

Here's a macaw.

(felt pen on paper, A4)

I had a macaw as my desktop wallpaper and it was really colourful, hence my reason for drawing it. It's 100% pen, no pencil sketches or outlines, which in a way accounts for the rather rough nature of the drawing (which I like). Once I was done, the bird and its bright colours reminded me of a tattoo... a tattoo that I would advise nobody to get, but a tattoo nonetheless*.

My scanner was also set at 600dpi and the initial full-sized scan was over 7000 pixels wide (!) so when I zoomed in to the wing the preview had this really abstract look:

Sometimes, drawing and looking at things the way they aren't is fun too.

My desktop isn't a macaw anymore. Today its a blurry leaf macro photo. In a few days it'll be something else. Ahhh, the customisation never ends...

*Apologies to all the people looking for a macaw tat and stumbling on this page instead. Google's keywords makes the rules, not me :)

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...

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.

Kalabaw

"Moo"? More like "..."

(acrylic on paper, A3)

This took a bit longer to finish than I'd expected, mostly because I thought I'd messed it up and didn't have the enthusiasm to fix it. But I did fix it, sort of.

And seeing as it's always nice to have some work-in-progress pics, here's a couple of work-in-progress pics. There would have been more but I got carried away with destroying and recovering the painting to take any more :)

 Click here for some more kalabaw-related goodness :)