My piece for the March Colours of the Month crossed over with Tutorial Tuesday.
After swatching and finding which of my markers matched best…
…I did these very cute dinosaurs.
April’s colours…
…were used on the April Scribble Into Art challenge.
And May’s colours…
…were used on the May Scribble Into Art. I like to combine challenges.
As you may or may not know, I have a list of different monthly art challenges. I’m trying to do a different one each year for each month. Last year I did Junicorn for June. This year I did JuneBug.
I’m not sure where I first heard about JuneBug, but there’s not a lot of information about it online. I could kinda guess what it was though. You draw bugs. In June.
I didn’t want to find/make a prompt list. And I didn’t plan on doing one a day. I just wanted to draw bugs. I even knew what style I wanted to do them in. Remember the watercolour bugs I did with the September Scrawlr Box?
I wanted to do something cute, cartoony, highly unrealistic, and colourful. I also wanted to do them digitally.
So I did. I ended up doing 15 of them, and I love them all. Maybe I’ll turn them into a sticker set or something. What do you think?
So, Tutorial Tuesdays is the one of these three habits (the others being Figure Friday and Sunday Studies) that I’m most keeping up with I think. It helps when one of my favourite artists releases a tutorial for me to follow.
I couldn’t resist drawing my three kitties.
Yes, originally Tutorial Tuesday was supposed to be helping with my digital skills. Yes, this piece was traditional. Who cares?
The next piece is traditional too. It’s also in the March Colours of the Month.
Next up is two sets of hands, included in my 1000 Hands challenge. Also traditional. I promise there’s some digital coming up soon.
Here ya go. Digital. It’s a unicorn, because unicorn.
Have another digital one. Another kitty – not based on one of mine this time.
But I’m gonna round up this blog post with a final traditional piece. I am Groot!!
One of my goals for this year was to improve my art. And there are multiple ways that I plan to do this. I’m trying to do more varied poses when I draw humanoid characters, rather than the standard front on view of someone standing with their arms by their sides. I’ve been doing it so far by copying pose reference images when I draw a character. But I figure (pun intended) that doing figure studies couldn’t hurt.
So I present Figure Fridays. I know myself better than to assume I’ll do it every Friday, or even that I’ll restrict it to Fridays. But it gives me a header for the page in my Notebook. I’m not going to do a blog post for each one either. I’ll group them, so there’s only blog post every so often.
I’m not sure if I’m doing figure studies right, but I sketched out some figures from pose references.
After that I decided to look into what a figure study actually was. When I googled “how to do figure studies” the first thing that popped up was my friend Sambeawesome’s tutorial video – I guess Google knows me well.
It’s a good video, full of excellent advice. As always. I’m not sure I care too much about accurate anatomy. I don’t draw realism things. It’s the “dynamic poses” she mentions that I’m interested in. And I won’t be doing 2 hour fully rendered studies. Just lots of sketches to get practice doing the strokes.
I will move on to actual human references at some point, maybe. Sam makes a valid point that no matter how accurate another artist’s work may look, it’s probably not. But, like I said, I’m not so bothered by accuracy.
Shout out for her brilliant little re-enactment scenes by the way.
The timing aspect might come into play later in the year. As I draw more and get used to it, and start adding more detail, I might start giving myself a time limit.
I LOVED the comment about the gesture line. That’s not something I’d considered before. (Sorry about your facial expression in the screenshot, Sam.)
Her advice is all very awesome, and I will definitely take it on board. I’m gonna continue just sketching from pose references for now. And as you can tell from my first attempt, I’ll be using references for chibi-style art too. Considering I’ve been leaning towards that style a lot recently, it seems like a sensible idea.
Here’s some more. Ignore the washi tape – I was just using up some scraps.
One of my favourite Twitter feeds is @StudioTeaBreak. They’re the people behind the shape challenges that I do occasionally. They have a weekly schedule for different challenge types.
On Mondays they do a Mythical Mashup – where they suggest a mythical creature and a random item for you to put together. Tuesdays are a Shape Challenge – but an environmental one, taken from someone’s photograph. Wednesdays are another Shape Challenge. Thursdays are Portrait Challenges – where they present a piece of art or a sculpture for people to draw. And on Fridays a Weekend Challenge is presented by @CFcomiX, always something different.
Once it was to draw a legendary creature being affected by human crimes against nature (pollution etc), once it was to design a sandwich based on your personality, once it was to combine an animal with a musical instrument. Some of these weekend challenges intrigue me, and some don’t.
The Plantimals challenge was one of those that did.
I decided that one of the many Mondo Mascots I’d screenshotted to draw would be perfect for this challenge. There were actually a dozen that would meet the brief, but I settled for Hana-chan.
I did it digitally – I’m doing a lot of art digitally at the moment, I’m really enjoying it. And I managed to put it in a scene too, which I’m trying to do more. I tend to have a lot of characters floating in white space.
For the background I experimented with some of the fun brushes. I did not draw all those leaves individually.
I think it turned out really cute. What do you think?
A few months ago the Trending For You section on Twitter showed me this tweet by Elemental.
The article is very cool. Synesthesia is a fascinating condition. But what captured me most was the generator. Obviously.
So what colour is my name? I decided before I even entered my name that I was going to do art based on this palette.
When it first came up my initial reaction was a wee bit of disappointment. I suppose I was kind of (irrationally) hoping it would be a rainbow. But as I kept looking at it I started to like it more and more.
Of course there are duplicates. I have duplicate letters in my name. This is logical. But the green, black, grey, yellow, and blue actually make a pretty palette.
So what to draw? Well, first of all, obviously, a monster.
This particular monster is a shape challenge monster.
I also decided to do something a wee bit more complex, and drew this girl.
Now that I’m getting more confident with digital drawing, I’ve been playing around with the different brushes.
Recently I did a piece for a 1980s themed challenge. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to do a character in 3/4 view because that’s something I’ve been working on.
I had a lot of fun doing it. My sketching skills aren’t great digitally yet so I sketched it out on paper, photographed it and then traced the line art digitally. I used tools for texture, different brushes, different shading techniques, included lots of detail. All things that were beyond me a few months ago.
For comparison, here is the first piece I did on this tablet back on November 10th 2019.
I still draw my monsters, but they’re looking a lot less messy when done digitally too.
But how drastic is this difference? I’m super proud 🙂
Since my last resin post back in October, I’ve collected a few more bits and pieces. I have a half-finished project that I started in February that I want to get around to finishing sometime soon, and since I’ll be using some of these bits and pieces I figured I’d do a resin haul and show you what I’ve got.
I got some small cat head molds to do some swatches/testing, except that they were waaayyyy too small (pen for scale), so I got some bead molds and some pendant molds.
I got some more molds, because molds are awesome.
Including this 3D unicorn mold that stands upside down while you cast it.
I got a sample of powder pigment, which was a hell of a job. I tried ordering from AliExpress and it never arrived, so I got a refund. And then I ordered from AliExpress again and it never arrived, so I got another refund. Eventually I paid twice the price to get one from eBay, and then one of the AliExpress ones arrived.
I got a whole bunch of gorgeous things to include in the resin.
I got some pots for storing things.
And some silicone jugs. These are actually the second set of silicone jugs I’ve bought. I bought a smaller set, and used them in the half-finished project from February, but they weren’t big enough.
I got some syringes.
And I got a set of scales.
Technically they’re for weighing resin, and weighing parcels for posting and things. Actually, they’re going in the kitchen. The mucky ones from the kitchen are gonna be for resin and stuff.
Finally I got a little wooden pendant to cast something pretty in.
My mold collection is looking pretty extensive at the moment.
And I have quite a few inclusions too.
I think I’m missing a few things actually. I’ll have to chase up everyone I might have loaned stuff too.
When doing my online grocery shop a while ago, I found this in the magazines section and decided to treat myself.
Inside are four pastel markers and two glitter glue tubes, and a colouring book. Obviously.
The colouring pages are your usual cheap adult colouring book fare, with just over half of them being unicorn or narwhal themed.
Step one: swatching.
The markers are water based felt tip pens, in really nice colours. The purple was a little dry though. The glitter glues are… well they’re glitter glues.
I coloured in this narwhal, using the glitter glue for his main body, and for inside the letters. Then I left it to dry overnight, because glitter glue.
And then, because that was kinda awful and I wanted to make something nicer, I used my alcohol markers to do this unicorn.
I tried to use the felt tips for a lettering piece, because the colours really were gorgeous. Four letter word…. I didn’t wanna be cliche and do “love” or anything, so I was gonna go with “cats” but the purple failed me.
Okay, three letter word. You know how I didn’t do “love”? Well I went and did my boyfriend’s name.
And then, to prove that I could, I got my alcohol markers out again.
One of my many Pinterest browsing sessions produced this.
I really liked the idea. It reminded me of some things I did a few years in some art journals when I was first getting interested in art.
I decided to see what I could produce with one of my monsters.
It’s a very simple drawing but I’m so very pleased with how it turned out. Look at that shading and blending. I think it shows how far I’ve come with my art skills 🙂
