New tricks.....

There are several people working on stippling or pointillism projects around the web and I have wanted to give it a try. Jeanette and Jennifer are working on rock drawings for Jeanette's rock challenge. There is also M.Ramos over at DS that does amazing pictures.

I found a pack of Staedtler pigment liner pens for reasonable. They say they are pigmented ink, archival, acid-free and come in 0.1, 0.3, 0.5 and 0.7. I also finally found a sheet of stonehenge paper.

I did this duck with the 0.1 pen on stonehenge, 3.5x2.5, ATC size. I am pretty happy with how he turned out. My Study of a Mallard Duck came in handy for having a good feel for how he looks.

Let me know what you think. Also am I using the right supplies and using the right terms to describe what I am doing.

William's deck of Cards......

William, my 12 year old son wanted to share the deck of cards that he has been working on. They are all from his imagination, except Stewie from Family Guy. He wants to know if you get whats funny about Stewie being there. He came up with all the designs on his own. William is my guy who is always drawing, not to bad, eh?

Birds, Birds, Birds......

More birds......

This guy just looked crazy, like he was doing some kind of Voodoo on the bird ahead of him. I couldn't get the other bird in, who looked like he was hunching his shoulders in and running, so I represented him with a feather. He was on the beach in Sanibel.

This poor bird didn't make it despite all the care he was given by the local children. They found him on the ground and he was a sorry sight in deed. I think this is my niece holding him. I decided to keep this one at home. All the bird photographs for this trade are from my own family photos. I am finding it harder this time to send out the finished cards. I keep thinking, I want to keep that one, and that one, and.........you get the point. I also kept two of the wood ones as they were a bit simple when separated out. (the neck and the front chest)

I do have the sketches that I started with so I suppose that if I get too sentimental I can redo them. This is the other page of sketches.

Farm Birds.......

The gossip pack here was a challenge for me as there were so many and they are such a light colour. I ran into some problems like being a bit too heavy with my pencil on out lining. The birds are a very soft gray and slightly darker on the bottom with white flecks. I think they are called guineas, but I wouldn't quote me on that.



This guy here I have to show the photograph for you to believe. He is so fluffy, with an almost jewel like colour on his/her face. He is being held by my sister in law, she was in love with the fluff ball.






These two are a beautiful rust colour. My colours are a bit nicer than this photo shows, but I am thinking I could still have used more layers. The farm birds are from pictures taken at my cousins farm in Michigan.

Swan time......

The photographs of these swans are from my husband. They were around on one of the school field trips that the kids went on. The trip was for one of those old fashioned villages. Nothing to do with swans but who could resist taking a picture when they sit there so beautifully.


I had to show the photograph for this curious guy, because I know my drawing looks funny. I was trying to recreate the dappled shade that the swan was standing in. Not an easy task as I found out. Both drawings are CP on drafting film.

Birds around my house......

This little guy was Gracie's toy bird, one of her first toys. This thing lasted for ages, which is always a big surprise for dog toys. The challenge on this one was to keep the toy looking yellow and still having shape and form.





Here is a Cardinal, the picture was taken out our back door. There were a couple of challenges here. One was getting the feeling of a lot of branches, without losing the bird as focus. Another was showing snow on the branches, while at the same time having snow in the background.

This tree is about a foot outside my front window. It is an over grown ornamental White Pine (if I remember correctly). The birds just love it for nesting in and the cats next door just love that they do! I am not sure if this was the mother or an older baby. The challenge here was the grayish-brown colour of the bird and the bit of sunlight shining through the tree lighting up the front of the bird.

I let you guys decide on how well I handled the different challenges that I faced doing these cards. All are Prisma CP on drafting film.



An updated picture of the pet chicken. I put in more colour and did a bit of burnishing with a colourless blender.

Pet chicken......

I wanted to try something different with this one. I wanted to be minimalist, having a sweeping s curve fading off to the sides. Well I didn't do so great but every body has to start somewhere. I knew I wanted the hen to be the main focus, as this is a bird trade, and I didn't want to go into the detail of his face. I also so admire a piece of art work with empty space, yet I always seem to fill in the whole page. So......here is my start to white space. This was done on drafting film with CP.

This is one of my cousins kids. He raised his own set of chickens, I can't remember what kind, but they are small and fluffy and they have tiny eggs. It was a riot seeing him playing with his toys and holding one of the hens at the same time.


Here is the page of rough sketches I told you about. So far I have done the three on the diagonal, top right to bottom left.

Fishing birds.....

This bird was waiting off shore for some fish to swim by. The pictures I used are from our trip to Sanibel Island. I used drafting film for these two. I rough sketched the birds on printer paper, then put the drafting paper over top. This allowed me to put the colour in without having to transfer the drawing. A big time saver, as I am down to my last week. I have 9 left to finish now.

This guy already caught his fish and had him up on shore. A good thing as he dropped it a couple of times. The background is the beach with small shells everywhere. I wanted to catch that look with out tons of detail. My bird looks a bit cartoonish to me.
I have 18 sketches done of birds that I have taken pictures of over the years. That will be enough for me to pick and choose and maybe have an extra or two. I'll take a picture of the sketches next time.

Study of a Mallard Duck........

We have a new exchange going on over at Drawspace. This one is Birds, Birds, Birds. This time there are 18 people in the group! I have a love-hate thing going for these big groups. I only do a card a day and it takes me forever to figure out what I want to do.

This was going to be 18 cards, done as a study of the pair of Mallard ducks, but I started looking at the female, she is going to take a lot of work. She might look all brown, but close up she is very detailed!





I do believe I am taking the thinking cap back out and doing something else for the rest of the cards.





I did these cards on plywood again, it is neat seeing how it affects the drawing. I had a hard time with the green on his head, it is very dark yet glows in the light. I did an underpainting in red to help push the darks.





I think I had some success with my Mallard Study and I got to try out some new things. I tried making gray for the birds side feathers using colours other than gray. I pushed myself for detail with the duck butt and did a fair job of it despite my whining (not quite as happy with the chest and back, despite same said whining!) Oh well it is all learning and I am off to do 11 more cards!


The photographs that I used for my study were all taken by my 10 year old son Douglas. The birds were living on my brothers pool cover.

Sunrise.........

Jim has this real thin birch plywood, you remember, the stuff that he cut the cats out of. I wondered how it would take coloured pencils. This sunrise is the result. I used a picture from our trip to Sanibel Island, Florida, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to.

The plywood took the colour very well. It is kind of cool to see the wood grain through the colours. If you look closely you can see some of the more prominent grain coming off the sun on the right side. I'll have to try something else that leaves more of the wood bare or that uses it as the median colour.


This was done in ATC size. Funny what your brain sees and makes important. Planning wouldn't hurt, but I just wanted to jump in.

Cats in the Mail.....

Here are the wonderful cats that showed up in my mail box. From top to bottom and left to right.
Garth -Exotic, Ken -Future King, Mindy -Curiosity, Donna -Where's my dinner, Jeanne -Cat#4, Gretchen -Play time, Cathy -Garfield, Sue -Grooming, Roxy -Jazz Cat, Kay -Cat on fence, Gilbert -Cat and ball, Len -Creeping kitty, Kim -Lazy afternoon, Claudio -The Cheshire cat, Marilyn -It's not what I wanted, Carol -Tuxedo cat, Sveta -The Artist/Sleeping cats.

Cats, Crazy Cats.....

Well, finally all eighteen cats are done! We have wood cats, playing card cats, moon lit cats and cat eyes.


I did a lot of sketching trying to get the look of cats with just simple lines. Jim noticed the sketches and mentioned that they would be perfect for something he was thinking about trying out. He had found this piece of really thin birch plywood and wanted to try it out. We decide my cats needed to be highlighted some how, so we came up with the cats on the fence in the moonlight. These are the beautiful result of a lot of painstaking cutting (by Jim). I do love it when he puts his mind to something artistic!

I then realized that these same drawings would be a good way to try out some water colours. I broke out a set of my kids water colours and gave it a try. It was really cool to see how when you wet the paper in just the area that you want to paint, the paint stays in that wet spot. For example I wet down just the moon area, fence, cat and sky were left dry. Then just dabbed in the yellow. Now if only I can figure out how to bring the sky up to the moon without bleeding in.
Oh well lots to learn and it was fun enough to go back for more.


As you can tell, just hand drawn eyes from my mind. I wanted to play around some more and see what I could do. I sort of used the brush like my colour pencils for the fur. The black on the top eye was done with black and the one on the bottom was done with several colours to make black, like I would with CP. I like the made up black better.


I ended up ditching the ace of clubs and I did fix the ears on the jack with white out. I know I am a terrible cheat. Doing these outline and silhouette drawings I have come to realize that I do a lot of fixing and shaping as I fill in with pencil or CP.

Cat cards.....

Well I am finally back. I have joined a trade at Drawspace to try to get back in the groove. I put my things away at Christmas and they just never came back out. The ATC trade is for 18 cards on Cats, Crazy Cats.
ATCs originally were playing cards that artists painted white and then put their own art on. So I thought I would try to incorporate that idea. It was harder than I thought, trying to get a drawing down to the minimal amount of lines and then inside of a shape. I think I could spend the whole month just trying to get these to look the way I want them, but I still have 13 more to do. The three or four redraws that I have done will have to do.

You might be wondering why Bob is on the back of Cat cards. We have always said that Bob is the biggest cat we have ever met. He is also my Avatar most places right now so he is recognizable as mine. Kind of like a signature.

Joker

Ace of Clubs
This one will have to get redone or stay home.

King of Spades

Queen of Hearts

Jack of Diamonds
Hm-m I wonder if white out will fix the lines across the ears?

Prehistoric trading cards....

Well their not great... I should have said no to this trade, but I was on such a good run. I had several sketches done and ready to do, but every time I took them out I just stared at them. I think I had ATC burn out. Jim suggested I should do cave painting, they'll be easy, ha! I talked him into doing them with me since I had no ambition to do this. We found out that those simple looking stick figures actually have beautiful sweeping lines and graceful curves. Not easy to do on a 2.5x3.5 card. I can't imagine how they did it on rock walls!
I am responsible for the funny looking rock walls that are in the background. I did them with oil pastels, something new to try and a quick way to put down a lot of colour. Jim did the three hunting scenes and I did the two on black.
Jim did the cards with dinosaur bones, one in oil pastel and one with a white conte pencil. while he did that I tried a cave painting of my own design on sand paper. I used a picture of a deer from our backyard, maybe not true cave painting style as you can see the face, but it was fun to play.

Getting started on the full Gracie....

I decided that I liked the Gracie nose on black paper enough to go ahead and do the full picture. This is the outline so far.

Here is the picture I will be working from. This was taken on a walk in the woods. I couldn't believe that she sat still long enough for me to get several pictures.


This is the Gracie nose with some white highlights added and trimmed into an ATC size. I also took the picture with better lighting, it shows more of the colours that I used.