Still no baby human yet: just over two weeks ’til due date.
But for the lovers of non-screaming, non-pooping, non-puking acquisitions, here is the Cintiq at work: (you can just about see my very chic homemade sidebar labels, a temporary addition until I remember what shortcuts they all correspond to!)
Totally blown away by this piece of kit. My poor little Intuos 5 in the corner is staring at me in abject horror…
Been back at the lino with some new cutting tools – the set from Pfiel is sooooo much better, and most importantly can be sharpened (my poor little Essdee blades were blunt and dead.)
Now it’s inked, the rollergirl print style reminds me a bit of the zodiac images you see in horoscopes etc. Maybe I should do a skating zodiac 🙂
Also this month, I tried 2-colour lino for the first time! Still working out things like how to get the two linos to register perfectly – but fairly happy with the result. Behold: The One Ring:
Ssssssomething a little different today. Detail from some branding I’m working on… Not every day you get to draw an angry snake 🙂
Well! After an exciting couple of weeks, I have set up my Etsy store and populated it with some of my more monstrous prints.
I’ve even got some in colour (gasp!)
I spent pretty much all of yesterday feeling sick and watching YouTube videos. This talk by David Litchfield (how a drawing a day changed my life) really resonated with me. I’ve been drawing every day for a while now, and I’m finding that my biggest problem is adhering to a style.
David Litchfield:
As soon as I see something different, I want to try it! So the next couple of updates are likely to be random drawings in various styles that I’d usually keep to myself, but I want get them out there in order to narrow down a style for myself that I want to move forward with.
I think the thing I love most about the style on the left is the completely raw message you can get across without getting bogged down in overly correct perspective, background and specifics. I HATE spending time on the physics of a drawing – I’m far more interested in a funny pose or a facial expression, or weird little details that make me laugh or think ‘hey that’s clever’. The rest is just slog. I love how nothing has to be overly ‘cute’ – if a character ends up ugly, it looks right and stays in style. It reminds me of when my friends and I used to play ‘scribbles’* in class and we’d create these absurdly funny, ugly characters because we didn’t have the physical freedom to put bits in the exact correct place.
So yeah, here’s to ugly drawings and enjoying the process as well as the outcome!
*Scribbles: where you scribble a simple-ish shape and your partner has to make a vaguely ok drawing out of it.
Finally getting round to colouring some old illustrations.
Really impressed with DesignCuts’ recent Photoshop brush offering: the ‘Woodland Wonderland’ brush set from RetroDesignCo.
These are just a few of the brushes, but the whole set is pretty comprehensive. All high res and give really satisfying detail:
The pre-spawn has turned me into a zombie this week, so thought I’d cash in on the down-time and make a tribute to my favourite literary hero: the Frog Prince. Hand-crowned with gold ink:
Below is my first attempt…
Which I was fairly happy with – except for the fact that I had to draw in the eyes, and fill in a bit of the belly with pen (got overenthusiastic with the cutter).
I also learnt that wood filler does NOT fix mistakes permanently. It worked okay for one print, but after rinsing down the lino the wood-filler disintegrated, leaving me with a sticky brown mess in my lino. So I abandoned ship and cut a new plate, with a few amendments.
Much prefer take two in red! Also way more reprintable as I don’t have to draw in the eyes every time.
I’ve lost track of how many inks I’ve tried that a) won’t clog up a fountain pen
b) write/draw smoothly and
c) can cope with a watercolour wash
I’VE FOUND IT!
Behold De Atramentis Document Ink in black (bought from purepens.com)
Barely even needs 10 seconds of dry time before it can cope with water. Pen is Pilot EF, so I’ll try it with a wetter feed pen in future, but so far am loving this combo.
Been working on some new bits lately; here’s a sneak-peek:
Sampson-next-door and Kyo. They both know Kyo’s apparently the bigger cat…
Some wedding bits – trying to get back into subtle characterisation; am very much enjoying the more simplified style.
Rocketlolly 