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!

Dream Monster 13

People she touches crumble into dust. Stay perfectly still and she may pass you by, not believing you to be a threat.

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Another dream monster! I’m starting to think that if I collect these into a book I’ll add some more illustrations showing how they behaved. There was a point in this dream when she was only millimetres away from somebody’s face, and they just had to stand completely still and wait to see if she killed them or not. It was very tense.

Dream Monsters

If you breathed in the gas you turned into one. They were all people once.

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More dream monsters! This collection is starting to reach a decent size, I think these are numbers 11 and 12. I dreamed these quite a while ago, but only recently had time to paint them.

I sent one to my friend Sammy and she didn’t appreciate it.

Sammy: :S why are you drawing body horror during a pandemic?

Sarah: because I had the day off work I guess

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!

2 More Monsters

A few months ago I posted some monsters from various dreams, and people on twitter seemed to really like them so I promised more whenever I next dreamed any. I rarely remember my dreams so it took a while, but here are two which finally turned up.

The woman appeared in between waking and sleeping, she shook her head, 'no'.

There was something wrong with the man in the old shack.

Winter Weather Spirits

Here are this year's Winter cards! This time it's a set of Winter weather spirits. I painted eight and sent the originals to friends and family last year, but printed a set of six as two of them didn't reproduce well.

I made six little snowflake stickers to go with them, and got colour-splash envelopes to match the Winter theme. They are ready to buy in my shop!

Acorns

Occasionally Sweetpea grows catkins under his ears in Spring, and even more rarely they become acorns! They get quite uncomfortable as they grow, but he's too proud of them to mind. He'll spend Autumn showing them off to anyone who will look and admiring them in puddles, then plant them out with great care.

Crows

Here are some crows! The left-hand one was painted for a birthday card, the right-hand one was... well I traced the watercolour one and this is what it wanted to be I suppose. It's watching us all.

6 Monsters

I don’t often have nightmares (in the sense of dreams that have a real feeling of terror rather than just horror imagery) but I do often see monsters in my dreams. Lately I’ve been doing watercolour sketches of some of the ones I remember, with a vague notion of using them for something later.

Starting from the top left, these appeared in my dreams as follows:

The Split-Faced Man - he didn't seem hostile, but he was covered in old blood.
The Man in the Doorway - he was impossibly tall.
The Rag Men - these were made of blood-soaked bandages and everything they touched rotted away.
The Maggot Men - there were many of these all crawling around far below me, they had bulbous eyes and thin, loose skin.
The Skinless Man - he broke his own jaw to prove we couldn't hurt him, there was no way to escape.
The Obese Demon - he was covered in tumours and extra limbs, he was slow but unstoppable.

In related news, I think I’ve finally got the hang of wet-on-wet watercolour painting.

UPDATE: Two more which aren't really monsters, but I decided the imagery was close enough to go in the set since I've had some requests for a sketchbook of these. These two are both from the same dream.

The 'baby' was found wrapped in newspaper, and you had to stay out of the searchlights.

Some Vrega

I'm fairly often guilty of developing characters with important colour schemes and then only drawing them in black and white, so here are some colour pictures of the vrega. There are many minor differences between them and humans, but the only obvious one is their slightly corpse-like purple skin, which you can never see because I never draw them in colour.

Khet and Vekh are showing off minor mutations that are considered to be a blessing from the god of nature, Violet wants to know if those spikes are sharp, and Visuk at the bottom just is not, and never has been, a morning person.

Bookmarks!

I promise these are the last ones! One of my favourite things about the design of the Diamonds is how huge they are, so I included their Pearls for scale (a Pearl is the size of a normal human). With these I think I got the desire to draw lovingly rendered portraits of alien autocrats out of my system, so if you're not a fan it's okay, it's over now!