Draw Your Day

 

 

 I recently moved house and didn't draw anything for about a month, so I set myself a 'draw your day' challenge to get drawing back into my routine. I originally planned to do it for the whole month of August, but I found it had served its purpose by the 12th (that is, I had started to have other ideas again), so I stopped there.

I learned a few things doing these too, like that William Morris pattern only has 3 hues. I would never have realised without copying it!

Festive Plants

A little out of season, here are my Christmas cards from last year! I went with simple botanical paintings, and I honestly wasn't sure how they were going to turn out as I hadn't done any botanical art in a while. In the end I was really pleased with them! The originals all went out to friends and family members as usual, but I'd like to try some different plants and flowers in this style now that I know how to do it.

The four at the bottom are my favourites from the set, I think if I had to pick one favourite it would be the Hellebore. I was so pleased with that one when I finished it!

Shaggy Inkcaps

I haven't used pen and ink for a while, I always worry I'll have forgotten how to do it, even though I've been working this way for years!

These are Shaggy Inkcaps, which are a tasty mushroom native to the UK. It's recommended to pick the young ones, as after the caps open they dye other food black! They can also be used to make real ink.

Some Common British Trees

Here's a little side project from the last few days. My pal Sammy Borras has been drawing a new comic (about a monster Riot Grrrl band!) which needs more rural backgrounds than her usual work and she wasn't happy with how she was drawing trees. I think the trick is to know what type of tree you're trying to draw so you can give it more distinctive features, but that takes a lot of research if you don't know much about trees to start with.

I'm a great believer in just asking someone who already knows before wasting time and energy starting from scratch, so I made her a cheat sheet showing the major visual features of 8 common British trees. Maybe someone else will find it useful too?

More Civil War

The last of the non-fiction drawings from when I had computer troubles.

This was really common when I was in primary school - comparisons of clothing styles between puritans and catholic royalists. One thing I noticed though is that they tended to show upper-class royalists, and middle or lower-class puritans, so I drew a standard upper-class royalist pair (although they ended up looking too much like the actual king and queen...) and tried to find information on what upper-class puritans would wear.

It turns out puritans were very much in favour of the social hierarchy, and upper-class puritans would have worn richer fabrics and embellishments like ribbons and lace edging to visually indicate their social standing. The open-fronted skirt was apparently a more conservative style at the time, because it required less of the more expensive outer fabric.

Civil war soldiers

In today's episode of 'things from when I had no computer', some different types of soldiers from the English Civil War.

Researching these turned out to be very hard, there was a lot of conflicting information. For example, would a pikeman have a sword? I found books saying both yes and no. In the end I thought that being in the front line with only a heavy, 3-4 metre spear would practically be suicide, and I couldn't see anyone agreeing to do it unless they also had a close-range weapon.

Anyway, I did my best with the sources I could find, but I won't be surprised if a historian pops up and points out lots of problems!

Cells, bacterium, virus

Today in ‘things I couldn’t post during computer trouble’, cell diagrams.

I was working on the sort of diagrams I remember from school, so I tried plant and animal cells at the two levels of detail you’d see at GCSE and A Level here in the UK, and a virus and bacterium for good measure.

I’d like to also try a more 3D approach, as they’re getting more popular in textbooks.

Plants etc.

I realised I never posted these diagrams I drew last year! I've been working on some non-fiction illustrations to expand my portfolio.