Ball-Point Pen Challenge

Lately I've been watching a lot of videos by DrawingWiffWaffles, and felt inspired to try some of the challenges/exercises she does. Maybe I'm starting to miss art school?

Anyway, here is Shasta drawn entirely in ball-point pen! We were encouraged to draw in pen a lot by our tutors because it makes you more aware of your line choices and less precious about each individual sketch, so this was very nostalgic. It is also a genuinely good exercise, much as I found it stressful in art school I would really recommend drawing in pen to anyone who wants to improve their sketches.

Fun fact: I never write with biros so I had to buy a cheap one from work specially for this piece.

Inktober 2017 - Part 2

Day 11 : fineliners and grey pen - If you didn't want to share your fancy tea with the house hobs, you shouldn't have left it unattended.

Day 12 : brush pen and coloured ink - Demons aren't allowed to walk around in human shape without at least one tell-tale feature.

Day 13 : ink and water - If only it really were just sleep paralysis

Day 14 : G-pen (and a brush for the black) - Shasta's face is not the most comforting sight to see looming over you when you wake up in a strange, dark world.

Day 15 : mapping pen (and others) - This one is a bit of a hodge-podge, it's mostly mapping pen, but I used a brush pen for the black and the effects on the ribbons, and a fineliner for the string.

A bundle of oak, ash and thorn twigs tied with red string will ward off fairies, both good and bad.

Day 16 : gel pens - Wipe that glamour off your face Trispin, Ely isn't impressed. I have a super-fine gel pen (0.25) that I rarely use, so I gave it a try for the hatching on this one. I like it but it's just so scratchy! I had to keep stopping to pick paper fibres out of the nib.

Day 17 : fineliners and grey pen - Lottie's 'friends' snuck up on her while she was reading. Partly inked on a moving train!

Day 18 : brush pen and ink wash - Isaac knows a lot of sung prayers, but he doesn't remember where he learned them. This one was partly inspired by Heikala's lovely process videos, I'd never seen someone get such a fine line out of a Pentel Pocket Brush and I wanted to try it myself. I also found a spare waterbrush pen so I've filled it with diluted ink, which means I can use ink wash when I'm out of the house as well.

Accurate skeletal hand brought to you by A Colour Atlas of Clinical Anatomy, since I was drawing this one at work at the medical library.

Day 19 : cartridge pen - I draw Lena in shiro-lolita a lot because it looks cute, but in reality she and Lucas don't have a lot of money and this old, eyelet lace dress is the only party frock she owns. This is another one finished on the train because I was determined to go to bed when I got home.

Day 20 : gel pen - Oof. This one is definitely in the 'why have I done this to myself' category. I sketched it in the morning, but didn't have time to ink it until late in the evening, and it took until 1:30am! What's worse, this sort of cross-hatching looks like absolute arse until it's nearly finished, so for most of that time I didn't even know how it was going to turn out. Thank goodness it looks okay.

Someone walking past might not see the shadow, but it's there.

Part 1, Bonus Picture, Part 3, Hallowe'en

Inktober 2015 - Part 3

All but the last one!

Day 21 - mapping pen and grey pen. My hand was still hurting, so I went with something simple again. Although having said that, those crows were an absolute pig to fill in. Lottie isn't sure how to feel about all these new friends.

Day 22 - ink and water. I went blackberry picking, so Sweetpea and Coriander did too.

Day 23 - mapping pen. This is the only one I drew all month where I just started doodling without planning it. I was pleased with it in the end because this is the most on-model Nat has been in years. He may be a bad influence on his sister.

Day 24 - mapping pen. Oh no! Jessie looks like him already! At least she's still got her clothes on. I was trying to avoid using the same type of inking two days in a row, but I thought day 23 could use a companion piece.

Day 25 - fineliners and markers. This one was hobbled by the sudden and unexpected death of my favourite purple marker. Spider is trying to learn how to bend a spoon, but he's about to be distracted.

Day 26 - ink and water. I'm still working on my backgrounds for the ink and water method, but I may have been too ambitious. Shasta's environment is hard to draw at the best of times.

Day 27 - gel pen. Just in case anyone was unclear on where Lottie's new friends come from.

Day 28 - g-pen and grey pens. Isaac is just floating around, doing dead person stuff.

Day 29 - cartridge pen. This is the same pen I use for ink and water pictures, just without the water. Lena is showing Lucas how to tell fortunes with playing cards. That's a real divination system, so bonus points if you can read what the spread means. (It's ace of spades reversed/10 of hearts/4 of clubs.)

Day 30 - gel pen. This is pleasingly symmetrical, both the second and second-to-last pictures are slightly disappointing pictures of Nat hobbled by a misbehaving gel pen. It must not like him.

Part 1, Part 2, Hallowe'en

Postcards - Autumn 2013

Here are this year's postcards, in my normal style. I just managed to get these done in time for Thought Bubble this weekend, they literally arrived in the post today! These seemed much harder than usual, I think I burned myself out doing Inktober. (I'll post those pictures later.)

These are Larkspur watching the marsh-lights, Nat and his shadow, Shasta carving some charms (because I'm going to keep putting him in these sets until someone likes him as much as I do) and Sweetpea being his adorable self in his home tree. The sharp-eyed among you may notice Shasta's postcard is a colour version of one of the first pictures I put on this blog.

Autumn 2012 Postcards

These are five of the ten new postcards I made to take to Thought Bubble. I'm really pleased with them, I think they show improvement from the last batch, which is always encouraging. Part of it might be that I really tired to limit my colour palette for all the new postcards.

They're all my own characters this time. There's Meilee and Lin, who have fallen asleep in the rain because they can't find any shelter, Shasta contemplating a remnant of the Old World, Jessie looking out over the castle town in her Patchworker uniform (it's a sort of messenger and general dogsbody, if you're curious), Louise being led into the woods by some fairies (they're still after that key), and the Crowboy giving Lottie a little gift.

More Postcards

These are the other 5 new pictures I took to the London Book Fair as postcards.  They were meant to be in my normal illustration style, but still appropriate to give to children's book publishers.  I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out, the colours came out very well on the cards.

Shasta

This little guy was designed for a university project, as a sort of post-human.  In the end he was only about a centimetre tall in the final image, but I liked his design.  He lives in a post-apocalyptic world where the sky is permanently covered with red and black cloud.  His people have excellent night vision and no natural protection against UV.  Their world never gets brighter than a clear night with a full moon, and nights are pitch black.

He's named Shasta after the main character of The Horse and His Boy, because it's common for them to choose names from any remnants of the old world.