Author: Colette Horsburgh

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.

Earlier this year I saw this on Twitter.

It looked super cute, so I investigated further. Darby’s Doom Rats are freaking adorable. You should definitely go check them out.

Here’s a Doom Rat version of Geralt from The Witcher, for instance.

So of course I had to Doom Rat too.

Then I added my own style to it.

I have a “How to draw” too, did you know? It’s posted here, and you can draw your very own little dome monster (or Domun) like mine.

Whilst playing this random wordsearch app last year, I was delighted that the words got highlighted in a rainbow order, in a really gorgeous palette.

So naturally, I used it for art. And I made a really REALLY pretty mandala with it.

Note the awesome difference that a little bit of shading can do on a mandala when I can be bothered.

I loved this mandala so much that I used it for the thank you postcards I include with my orders.

At some point in April I decided that May was going to be Munchies May.

So for every day in May, I drew a cute kawaii item of food. Mostly every day. Sometimes I did more than one in a day, and occasionally I missed a day. But I did 31 drawings, all in May.

As you can see, I actually finished them quite a bit before the end of May. That’s because before I’d even finished the second piece, I’d decided I wanted to make some these into stickers.

I was super eager to get the series finished, so that I could pick my favourites and turn them into stickers.

I picked 9 desserts, and 9 savory food items. And now I sell them as individual die cut stickers, and also as very cute sticker sheets, which you can buy here.

This advert fell right into my criteria for art palettes.

To be fair, there’s not a lot of criteria. Pretty much just – rainbow.

So I took the screenshot to Procreate and colour picked some palettes. More than one because those vans have shadow and highlights.

And then it sat in my Procreate projects for ages and ages waiting for me to get round to doing some art with it.

Before I did, I spotted another advert for the same game, with a different rainbow. So I had to grab that and turn it into a palette too.

And eventually, I got around to the art.

And then I used them to mess around with some repeating patterns too.

This month I turn 40 years old. I can barely believe it. My body occasionally reminds me, but mostly I don’t feel 40.

To celebrate, I’m running a sale on my Etsy store.

40% off absolutely everything! For the whole month of October.

Go check it out.

It’s very nearly my birthday, so now is the perfect time to show you one of the presents I got last year.

Any unicorn is a winner gift for me, and one that came with rainbow pens? Even more awesome! I swatched them on the back of the canvas, to make sure they’d work. You’d think they would, since they came with the kit, but you can never be too sure.

And then I just started colouring. I didn’t really have a plan. Just filling up the spaces in the background without having two sections next to each other be the same colour.

As you can see, I also coloured his mane in the neon rainbow. But I didn’t want to do the unicorn’s body that way. Partly because it would all just blend and not stand out, and partly because the pens were practically empty.

So I went with metallics instead. And doesn’t he look gorgeous?