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Scrawlr – January 2022

I haven’t gotten a Scrawlr Box in several months now – partly cost, and partly because the contents were more often not-so interesting to me. But I do have a few old boxes sitting in my blog folder waiting to be posted about.

Because of the hit-or-miss nature of the contents, I’ve been waiting until boxes are out & revealed and then buying them from the Previous Boxes shop if I’m interested. Unfortunately this isn’t gonna be an option much longer cos they’re closing the Previous Boxes shop.

January 2022 is one of the boxes I bought because I really wanted to try these Karin Pigment DecoBrush Markers.

The featured artist print is pretty cool too.

The markers were cool – and if someone were to buy me the full set I’d be over the moon – but my favourite bit of this box was the Micron pen – I LOVE chunky lining pens.

I do need to work on my blending when I use these markers again though. I’m getting out of the habit of traditional art.

Animal Alphabets

See, I told you I’d write the second post right away.

The current series of the Animal Alphabets challenge on Twitter is Animals in Situations.

It’s a little weird one, and I haven’t really been doing the situations. But I have been doing the animals.

(had to do a this specific bear, and he looks just so cute)

I am particularly pleased with the art I’ve been doing. I’m definitely settling into my own style.

Hopefully, in theory, I’ll be getting the rest of the series up before halfway through the next series.

Animal Alphabets

It’s been so long since my last Animal Alphabets update that not only have I finished the Breeds series, but we’re more than halfway through the new series too.

First up, let’s finish the Breeds series. I left you after N for Narrangansett Turkey.

I’m just gonna pause here. Because around letter U, I got a private message from the Animal Alphabets account.

This was a huge surprise and I was incredibly flattered! In case you’re wondering; when a letter is announced it is accompanied by a guest illustration. Like this…

I agreed, almost immediately. And picked X to give myself some extra time. And I’m so proud of what I did – even if I’ve never heard of that particular breed of dog.

So here’s the whole animal breeds alphabet.

I’m gonna leave the current series for the next blog post. I really am. I promise. I’m gonna write and schedule it right now, and not leave it months and months.

Cloud Doodles

At some point in the distant past I collected this image from Pinterest.

And I thought that it was a really cute art idea. I made a note to take some photos of clouds next time I went out.

Except that I have multiple conditions that means I don’t go out a lot. Or at all really.

So it took about six months for me to get any ph0tos to use. I mean, I could have just downloaded some, but I wanted to do it myself for some unknown reason.

In October we went to Paris for my 40th birthday and while we were there the weather was just right for cloud pictures.

And when we got back it only took me 6 weeks to actually do some doodles.

I do like how they turned out though. Very cute.

There are more cloud photos sitting on my iPad waiting to be doodled on one day. Perhaps you’ll see them.

Small Robots

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.

Velvet Art Monsters

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.

Halloween Art Collab

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!

Follow Up Monsters

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.