Author: Colette Horsburgh

2022 was a hell of a year – in good ways and in bad ways.

Here’s hoping for a peaceful, quiet, uneventful 2023.

Happy holidays to all who celebrate, whatever you celebrate. And if you don’t, then happy Sunday.

And here’s one for those who aren’t so jolly.

One of my favourite Twitter accounts is Small Robots. All about very simple but adorable small single-purpose robots. Like this one:

I’ve done some Small Robots fan art in the past, like the collection of them I did for my 100 Robots challenge in 2019.

So when I was scrolling through the feed to find robots to draw for that piece, and I found this tweet…

… I had to save it to do. At some point. And I did do it. Eventually.

And then, more than a year later, I got round to actually blogging about it.

I picked up this little pack of velvet art images from The Works for just a couple of quid.

Do you remember velvet art posters? They used to be everywhere when I was a kid – way back in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s. They were usually large poster sized pieces of heavy cardstock, and you can still get them like that sometimes.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve done a few of these since being an “adult”, and I even have a small stack of them waiting to be done one day.

But I’m a sucker for monsters, so I had to pick this up.

For £2 you got three different images, and a dinky little set of felt tip pens.

For tiny cheap markers they were actually pretty good and saturated.

Unfortunately, they are water-based, and therefore streaky. Plus, the velvet has a tendency to bleed into your ink. So I did five monsters with them, one for each colour.

Then I switched to alcohol markers for the rest of the little monsters. For the big monster in the middle I was initially going to do a pastel gradient, to make him stand out. But I quickly realised that wasn’t going to work out.

The material didn’t really allow for a blend, and the bleeding velvet did not work well with the pastel colours. You can see the mess even more when I tried the eyeball.

Okay, so let’s cover up the pastel with greys.

Or not.

At this point I was about ready to give up and throw the damn thing in the bin. So I took a break and took a photo of Jasper being adorable on the packaging.

Then I resorted to Posca pens.

Always resort to Posca pens.

I’ve done a few art collaborations with Nina before. She’s very talented, and fun to work with.

The last one we did was a Valentine’s one back in 2020. But after a couple of years we decided it was time for another one.

For Halloween, we swapped a basic scribble. The only rules were Halloween-themed, and you had 13 minutes to do it.

Here’s the doodle that Nina sent me.

Despite the fact that all I could see was boobs, I managed to something family friendly.

Of course, I couldn’t stop at just that. So after I’d saved the 13 minute version, I did a bit more drawing and created a finished piece.

Jasper helped.

He wouldn’t move out of the way, so eventually I just placed the iPad on top of him. He stayed like that for more than an hour. I moved before he did.

And here’s what I created.

Here’s the scribble that I sent Nina.

She did hers live on on her Twitch stream, which you can watch the VOD of here.

Her timer stopped working, and she ended up working for about 25 minutes according to the time stamps, but she made something so adorable I think she can be forgiven.

Happy Halloween everyone!

I used to do a semi-series where I’d take one of the monsters I do when swatching new art supplies, and redo it in a fancier, more polished way.

While sorting my blog folders recently I found a few that were waiting to be blogged.

Some of these I look at now and think I could probably do an even better job. Maybe I’ll do some Follow Up Follow Up Monsters.

Back at the start of September I told you about my Halloween art concept called Earlyween and showed you my first piece

My original goal was to do 13 pieces, and select 9 to make a sticker range. But September kind of got away from me and in the end I only did nine pieces.

Good job they’re all absolutely adorable then!

And as of right now you can buy them as individual die cut stickers, or as a sticker sheet.

Not only that, but I’ve reintroduced button pin badges to my shop, starting with these little dudes. You can get them here too.

And if you’re shopping, don’t forget that all orders over £5 are 40% off for the entire month of October.

I’ve always loved The Simpsons. And Futurama was one of my favourite shows ever. But South Park never appealed to me. Until I met my partner Tom.

We watched all of South Park. And I may have done some fan art. Can you guess who my favourite character is?

Do I really need to explain why I bought these?

They’re very smooth, very juicy, and very pretty.

And I don’t really have a full completed art piece with them. But I do have a LOT of doodles.

I do also have a full set of them sitting on my Amazon wishlist. More colours!

I love pastel colours, and I love pastel coloured art supplies. But I am very very suspicious of them.

For instance, these Pastel Fineliners from Paperchase. The barrels are very pretty pastel colours.

The ink inside them, is not.

They aren’t ugly colours. And they’re lovely and smooth. But they aren’t pastel.