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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Yesterday I wrote about the awesome Twitter art challenges I’ve found. I mentioned that I’ve only found two so far… this is the second.
I can’t remember how I found out about it, but I’m following more and more artists every day so it was probably something that one of them shared. @Animaloonies
The Animaloon Collective is a completely awesome concept. You take an animal and you turn it into a balloon. On the 2nd Tuesday of every month people post their creations, with the next theme being given in advance so everyone can draw the same animal. Here’s the Twitter header with some brilliant examples.
I missed the deadline for November so the theme I was going to start with was this one…
Having recently decided that I want to draw more Christmas stuff, I picked an elf. I haven’t had time to do a pig as well. Especially since the elf ended up taking a bit longer than planned.
I drew out a sketch in my sketchbook, and decided to just colour it in with felt tips rather than do the whole marker thing. And it’s kinda cute.
Except that I figured he needed a background, and I wasn’t overly happy with the colouring. So I had another go.
I traced it out using my lightbox, and also traced out a tiny familiar silhouette in the corner because I didn’t trust my skills enough to do something so complicated so small. And then I coloured in the elf. I really enjoy doing the blending and shading, although I definitely need more colours.
I knew what I wanted to do for the background, but first I needed to do some experimenting. I wanted a nice gradient from black to a light blue. I tested all of my blues but I really don’t have enough. I have 11 blues, but not quite enough with the same hue (I think that’s the right term, I’m working on my colour theory) so I wasn’t completely happy with the resulting gradient. And it used a LOT of ink, but then I guess all marker pieces do. I finished it off with some tiny white dots of gel pen ink to make some stars.
I love how it turned out. It’s my first full page piece and my first scenic background rather than random patterns or washi tape. And it just looks brilliant. I especially love the little halo around the elf, done with the colourless blender.
There are so many little details that I’m proud of, but I don’t want to toot my own horn so I’ll just beam with pride privately.
Do you know of any other Twitter art challenges I should have a go at?
Crafted By Colette 
There are so many great challenges on Twitter!
You definitely should check out @studioteabreak, they have some great challenges for different days of these week, I particularly do love the #portraitchallenge, where you try to interpret a (sometimes even famous) portrait of another artist!
Then there is #colour_collective each friday. They only set the colour, the picture ist completely up to you. And you don’t have to do the whole picture in this colour, some only use it for the highlights. And don’t worry if you don’t have that certain colour in your palette, you should find something quite similar…
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Oh, that’s brilliant! I shall definitely look into those. Thank you 🙂
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