Crafted By Colette

For December 1st-24th (and possibly a Christmas day bonus), I’ll be posting an art-related blog post every day.  If you visit my blog during this time, let me reassure you that I’m not just an art blog.  I do all the crafts.  You can look through my archives, or stay tuned for future posts, to see the other crafty things I get up to. 

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I’ve been thinking about setting up a DeviantArt account for a month or two now.  But I couldn’t make the actual decision.  I guess I kinda felt like I wasn’t a “proper” artist.  So I asked Twitter.

I don’t have a huge amount of followers, but I guess that answers that question.

And so, I set up a DeviantArt account.

It’s kinda small right now, but it’ll grow.  Hopefully.

Are you on DeviantArt?  Let me know!

 

For December 1st-24th (and possibly a Christmas day bonus), I’ll be posting an art-related blog post every day.  If you visit my blog during this time, let me reassure you that I’m not just an art blog.  I do all the crafts.  You can look through my archives, or stay tuned for future posts, to see the other crafty things I get up to. 

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One of the many challenges I have noted down in my notebook to try is The Pencil Case Challenge.  This one involves swapping pencil cases with a fellow artist and creating a piece using just the supplies inside.

My artist friend (Cayden) didn’t feel ready to have a go but happily handed over his pencil case.

Inside were these lovely goodies.

Step 1: swatching.

Cayden likes blue.  That gold that you can’t read because of my atrocious camera skills is Shimmering Sands ink by Diamine, in a fine nib Moonman pen.

I took on this challenge on a game night, so I wasn’t focused entirely on the artwork. As a result I wasn’t finished by the time Cayden went home.  But he was due to come and visit again in a couple of weeks and promised not to change the contents of his pencil case in the meantime.

When Cayden had to go home I’d done the sketching.  I’d come up with some kind of design, decided the hat was too big, erased it with this nifty cute little eraser…

 

 

 

…changed the orientation of the page a few times and finalised the image.

Now, this is where I’d normally show you what I did manage to do.  Except that for some unknown reason I didn’t take a photo.  So I can’t.  What I can show you is what I started the next session with, which isn’t quite the same thing.  Because I cheated a little.

Since I happened to have two of the exact same pens, in the interveneing weeks I used the Uniball Air to outline her hair, and the Zebra Mildliner to fill in her face.

(I have just now – literally as I write this – realised that on my swatching page I wrote “mild liner” twice instead of writing the actual colour.  It’s mild blue, if you’re interested.)

In the second session I had with the pencil case I…

• used the Tombow Brush Pen to fill in the hat.
• filled in the hair a little more.
• added another layer to her face with the mildliner.
• used the Fire and Ice ink by Robert Oster in the TWSBI 58AL fountain pen to fill in the eyes.
• used the afore-mentioned Shimmering Sands ink to do the detail on the hat band – which I left to fully dry overnight before erasing the pencil beneath out of fear of smudging it.
• redid the outling of the face with the Uniball Air.

 

The blue smudge on the right side there is because I was an idiot and did some layering and testing on the back of the paper.  But other than that I’m really happy with this piece.  I wish I could have taken a picture of the hat band that shows how awesome that ink it.  I can show you this little bit though, which helps but still doesn’t really do it justice. This is from where I was testing to see if erasing pencil after inking would ruin the sheen.

I’d really like to do this challenge again, but I don’t have any other friends in real life who are artists.  Maybe one day.   Or maybe I could ask Cayden to curate a special pencil case for me.  We’ll see.

For December 1st-24th (and possibly a Christmas day bonus), I’ll be posting an art-related blog post every day.  If you visit my blog during this time, let me reassure you that I’m not just an art blog.  I do all the crafts.  You can look through my archives, or stay tuned for future posts, to see the other crafty things I get up to. 

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So despite not having completed Inktober, when the month rolled over to November I decided to take on a second consecutive monthly art challenge.

One of the things I struggle with when drawing my monsters is what shape to start with.  So to make it easy, every image for Huevember would begin with a circle.

Initially I wanted to use my alcohol markers, because I love using them.  So I had some more swatching fun.

Some days ended up close enough, like Day 1.  Some days were spot on, like Day 3.  And some days weren’t very close but they’d have to do, like Day 4.

 

But eventually I had my palette.

This is where I made my first mistake. I noticed that some brands feathered quite badly on this paper…

…and I chose to ignore it.  Because I love my alcohol markers and I was commited to that particular square sketchbook.  But then I started colouring.

So.  Much.  Bleed.

This is the point where I wised up and decided to use a different medium.  So I got out my beautiful Faber Castell Polychromo pencils and got with the swatching again.  Until I had another pretty palette.

 

Never one to keep things simple, I decided here that things needed a little extra challenge.  I have a page in my bullet journal that looks like this…

When I can’t decide what to draw, I grab my dice and provide myself with some pieces that I HAVE to include.  Wouldn’t it be fun if all my Huevember pieces used this chart?

The problem I’ve found is that I roll a lot of high numbers for number of things to include.  So some of my monsters have come out looking a little odd.  But that’s okay.  All my drawings are a little odd.  I’M a little odd.

By the end of November I hadn’t completed Huevember.  I had 14 completed pieces…

 

…three inked pieces waiting to be coloured…

…two sketched pieces waiting to be inked and coloured…

…and 11 blank pieces of paper.

I am not partaking of a monthly art challenge in December – unless you count this Arty Advent blogging thing I’m doing – but I do plan on finishing Huevember by the end of the month.  And then in January there’s Art Jounral January, or Creatury….

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PS: I can’t leave a monster unfinished so I finished that monster from the false start.

 

For December 1st-24th (and possibly a Christmas day bonus), I’ll be posting an art-related blog post every day.  If you visit my blog during this time, let me reassure you that I’m not just an art blog.  I do all the crafts.  You can look through my archives, or stay tuned for future posts, to see the other crafty things I get up to. 

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After our Platonic Doodle Date back in October, both Cayden and I decided that our rushed 10 minute pieces had a lot of potential.  So we took the same scribble…

…and the same colour palette..

…and drew the same pieces, but with no time limit.

Cayden’s transformation looked like this.

 

 

And my transformation looked like this.

 

 

I think mine was slightly more drastic, but they both look excellent now 🙂

We’re both working on follow ups to the 20 minute challenge too, so keep an eye out for that.

For December 1st-24th (and possibly a Christmas day bonus), I’ll be posting an art-related blog post every day.  If you visit my blog during this time, let me reassure you that I’m not just an art blog.  I do all the crafts.  You can look through my archives, or stay tuned for future posts, to see the other crafty things I get up to. 

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This is my 100th post.  For it I needed a special piece of art.

A week or so ago I made a washi tape collage inspired by an image I’d found on Pinterest.  I didn’t know what I was going to do with it though, so it’s been sitting in my sketchbook.

When I realised that my 100th post was upcoming I decided to put the numbers 1, 0 and 0 on that collage.  But they couldn’t just be plain numbers.  I considered fancy lettering, but went with what I’ve been enjoying for months.  I made monsters in the shapes of the numbers.

Cutting them out was fun.  I used Faber Castell’s Mixed Media pad which is 250gsm.  Not the thickest in the world, but thick enough to be sturdy.  And thick enough to mean my scissors weren’t working well.  I tried several different pairs but couldn’t get a nice clean edge in some places.  Still, that’s what the magic of black edges are for.

And I couldn’t just stick them on the collage.  I needed a bit of oomph, so I used sticky pads so they’d raise off the page a little.

So here’s to 100 blog posts, and to many hundreds more.