Category: Uncategorized

My last Colours of the Month update was a year ago, not that anybody is surprised, so let’s continue from there.

Of the ones that I’d missed, I got round to September 2020, eventually. October and November are still in my “to do” folder. Then December 2020 to April 2021 are in the last update.

I’d missed May, June, and July 2021 but I’ve done them now.

August was missing, so I went back and found that one and did it.

September 2021 was the last one of the last update, and then we continue on with me not doing October. That’s in my pile.

December is in my pile to do.

I have no idea where April is. I can’t even find it on the Marker Universe Twitter thread. So we’ll just ignore that one.

In the last few months, and some of the catch up months, you might have noticed a trend. I’ve been using the colours as clipping masks for mandalas and zentangle pieces, and I love it. So I’ll probably keep doing that from now on.

In July 2020 I wrote about loving the symmetry tool on my tablet and the Ibis Paint program I used.

Well, since then I got myself an iPad. And I’ve been doing a LOT more digital art. And I may have a small addiction to mandalas.

Procreate annoyingly only has an 2, 4, or 8 section symmetry option. Ibis Paint let you pick any number up to 36 I think. I’ve been thinking recently about downloading Ibis Paint onto the iPad specifically for mandalas. I’ll let you know if I do.

In the meantime, please enjoy this gallery of a million mandalas. (Hmmm, alliteration. Maybe that should be a challenge.)

When I posted my Animal Alphabets update last year, I mentioned I wanted to go back to a few of the Fan Art series ones that I missed.

Well, I did do Road Runner, and I did Wile E. Coyote as well. I’m not sure where I got this idea – I’m pretty sure I saw a half and half image on Pinterest somewhere a million years ago and thought it was a great idea.

These two characters were absolutely perfect for this.

I love this piece so much. I really want to do more pieces in a similar style. Some of my planned pairings will be fine – like Jack Skellington and Sally.

But I’m not sure how Sulley and Mike will turn out.

Buzz and Woody should be okay though.

What other iconic duos should I add to my list?

Since I’ve started blogging again (and keeping up with it so far, yay me) I’ve updated you on the Animaloonies challenge I do regularly, and the Animal Alphabets one, and the Scribble Into Art one. But there are more art challenges that I do regularly, so lets update you on another one.

The Colour Collective is a Twitter that posts a pair of colours every week, for you to use as a palette and post your art on the Friday. The last update I did was a year ago – I’m really good at this blogging thing.

These are going to be in no particular order, because until recently I just collected them and used them randomly, rather than doing them every week.

I did a couple of pieces where I used two palettes.

Then in July I decided that since I’d collected a whole bunch of palettes that I still hadn’t used, I’d start a series.

I embarked on a Zentangle Colour Collective Alphabet. Each letter has the first colour of a palette as its main colour, then a Zentangle pattern over the top in the second colour, with the pattern name beginning with that letter.

I’m not complete yet, but I have used all the colour palettes I’d collected, so now I’ll be doing them weekly as new ones are released.

And that’s up to date! Except…. that when sorting through all my images I found these three palettes.

I could have sworn I’d done all of them, but I have no corresponding art for these three in the blog folder. It’s possible I just forgot to copy them, so I’ll have a look through my Procreate and do another post later.

If you noticed a major increase in digital art in recent posts it’s because I finally got an iPad this year. I got it in February, and there was gonna be blogs about using it, and learning new skills and stuff. But then.. well, I’ve already gone over that.

I will be doing some posts about the digital art, but I just wanted to do a photo dump first. Because I found fluffy brushes. They’re so awesome!

These first three were tutorials by Bardot Brush that came with a base sketch.

And then these ones were tutorials too – but without sketches. They’re by Fooarc.

And the rest were all me.

You might have noticed that I love any excuse for a palette challenge.

So when I saw this on Facebook, that little lightbulb went off over my head.

I didn’t click on it, but I screenshot it (obviously), then in Procreate I highlighted the first colours I’d seen – I was completely honest with myself too.

Then I selected colours to use.

Then came the fun bit. Art!

What do you think?

National Doodle Day was a huge success.

They raised a huge amount of money for Epilepsy Action.

And on top of that I had two personal victories. Firstly, they used my art in their collage image when announcing the live auction. (I’m the one on the top left corner).

And secondly, people actually bid on my art! There were a LOT of art pieces and I did see a few in the end that hadn’t had any bits. That was one of my fears.

But not only was there a bid, but there was a bidding war. Well, more of a bidding skermish. If you look at the bidding times, the final bid was in the last few seconds of the auction. Sniped!

Thank you so much to whoever bid! I’m so pleased I could help raise money for charity. Enjoy the monsters!

I have a cupboard full to bursting of projects I’ve collected to do blogs on. When I buy these things I fully intend to do the blog right away. Sometimes I even do. But most of the time they end up consigned to the cupboard never to be seen again.

Recently I culled the contents of that cupboard, and moved what projects I kept to somewhere most visible in the hopes that I’d see them and be reminded.

One of the things I found was this.

I have absolutely no idea when I bought this. Or how much it cost. I do remember though that these things have pretty awful reviews.

It seemed decent enough on first opening. It came with a nice selection of tools, including an almost full rainbow of thread.

The snips looked a little bit mucky, but they’re pretty good. Nice and sharp.

And then I took the machine itself out of the bubble wrap.

Maybe it has fabric in it for display purposes. Or demonstration. But I suspect it was a return that was just send back out without checking.

Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt, put batteries in it and see what happens.

What happened was that the thing had a life of its own! It didn’t matter whether I switched it on or off, or locked it on or off, it just kept going. Occasionally it would stop for a few moments. Lull you into a false sense of security. Then it’d be off again like a wild animal.

So that immediately went in the bin.

Time to go back to the shelf of forgotten blog projects.

Time to do an update on the Animaloon Collective Twitter art challenge. My last update, like pretty much everything else, was a year ago. I’m trying to work on that.

Since then I not only did the Giraffe challenge that I missed, but I did two giraffes. Giraffi?

I didn’t do the Moose, or the Goose from the end of 2021.

I did do Mythical from January 2022.

And I did the Otter from February. For this one I actually followed a YouTube tutorial by BeeJayDeL.

(Yes, by this stage I have completely given up even trying to make balloons anymore.)

March was a Wombat.

April was a Beetle.

May was a Lion. I did a very specific lion, can you tell who he is?

June was a Panda.

For July’s Mole I did a bunch of sketches from random images on Pinterest and covered it with a gradient coloured clipping mask.

I liked that style so much I did the same thing for August’s Flamingo.

I had to do a full illustration for September’s Gecko though cos they’re just so damned cute.

I plan to catch up on the ones I’ve missed, so I’ll probably do the clipping mask sketches for those. They’re fun.

My boyfriend Tom once wrote a video game. Little Demons: The Angel Hunt. It wasn’t a very big video game, but it does have it’s own page on World Of Spectrum as you can see.

It also has a couple of videos on YouTube. Like this one:

Now, I mention this for a reason. You’ll notice the little character icons on the right are little demons. You might even say they’re monsters.

I’m pretty good at drawing monsters.

So I had to really.

Tom’s reaction? He really liked it. He said I encapsulated what he’d intended, but he only had a few pixels.

He did do a few other games, but most of them were “a bit s***” (his words). If you’re really interested, look up XFAWorld.