Inktober 2018 : Day 3 - fineliners and grey pens

I drew Sweetpea this way last year, so here is his best friend; Coriander! She belongs to a holly tree that grows right next to his oak, so they see each other every day. As an evergreen, her ear frills don't fall off like his do, but she does sometimes grow berries under them.

Inktober 2018 : Day 2 - Pentel Pocket Brush and ink wash

Alexis is a type of angel made to interact with humans, so even his unnatural features look soft and friendly. He likes loose, fluffy clothes like jumpers and scarves.

My Pentel Pocket Brush is one of my favourite pens, but I don't think I've mastered it yet. I usually do my inks in two or three steps but with a brush pen it seems it's better to make one line and then leave it alone. I'm going to try to use it more this Inktober to see if I can really get the hang of it.

Inktober 2018 : Day 1 - Fountain Pentel

When Nettle loses her temper at school, the sports field is the biggest casualty.

It's finally time for Inktober, my favourite art challenge of the year! I was out of the house for the first three days and didn't have access to my scanner, but I did do the drawings.

This year I want to try to use some of my more uncooperative pens. This one is a Fountain Pentel which is a bizarre soft-nib pen that almost acts like a brush. (I think it might be designed for writing kanji.) It splatters horribly when I use it, but it also makes some really nice, scrappy lines. I'm sure if I practice I can get something really good out of 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.

4 Sci-Fi Eyes

I wasn't sure if the top two should count as one or two eyes, since they're the same person.

Apparently I hadn't got all the eyes out of my system, so here are four more. These are three aliens from a story I don't think I've ever shared before, so I suppose this can be their first introduction! All of them are members of a royal court in the far future, far away from Earth.

Top to bottom these are: Jothan, a Perevin courtesan (both relaxed and agitated); Susu, a Shyskish courtesan; and 'Sapling', the Dai Empress.

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.

6 Eyes

I scream, you scream, we all scream when we observe an injury or deformity of the eye.

I'm short-sighted but never wear my glasses so my eyes feel weird a lot of the time, and I also enjoy trying to express how things feel with visuals, so that's probably where this sort of thing springs from.

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.

Coloured Ink

 Lately I ordered some nice pen accessories, including a cartridge converter for my Rotring pen and some coloured cartridges for my cheapo £5 cartridge pens, so I drew Nettle and Spider while I was messing around testing them. I’ve never done spot colour with ink and water, it looks pretty nice I think.

Having said that, I’m not a fan of this ink. It’s a weird colour called Bilberry that can’t decide if it’s blue, purple or black. (I tweaked it in photoshop to make it more purple.) They do one called Imperial Purple that might have been a better bet. Ah well, next time.

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.

Fret and Larkspur

At long last, pictures of Fret and Larkspur in colour, so you can all actually see a major part of the character designs I never, ever show! Also, I’ve finally worked out how to get muted colours out of my coloured pencils, it’s only taken 18 years…

Sympathy with their environment makes elves of their type rapidly change appearance to match the plants and light where they live. Fret lives in a birch grove and therefore resembles a birch tree, Larkspur once lived in a beech forest and looked very different, but now she lives in a fetid marsh and appears sodden and mud-flecked, with hair like reeds. Fret had spent a century believing she had burned to death with her forest, and didn’t recognise her at first.

Pocket Witch Vox

Do you remember the Pocket Witches? Introducing Pocket Witch Vox!

Before she took shape Vox encountered a little girl who loved to sing, she had no ear for music at all and was horribly out of tune, but she was too little to know it and loved to listen to the radio and belt out songs at the top of her voice, pretending to be a pop star. It made her so happy that Vox was able to take form from her happiness, and took the shape of a song!

Unlike the little girl, Vox is an excellent singer who can mimic any voice and change her outfit to match the song she sings. She likes to hang around humans who love music and sing along to whatever they’re playing, she doesn’t care if you’re any good, only that it makes you happy. Karaoke bars are her favourite place in the world.

Address Labels

I’ve been getting a little bored of the stamps I use when I package Etsy orders, so I’ve made myself some address labels! The larger ones are for the customer’s address and the little ones are for the return address. (I did have to edit the top one slightly from how it appears here to give myself more space though.)

I was tempted to make more, but I’ll stick with these two for the time being. I have a bad habit of being over-enthusiastic when I make things and ending up with too many to use!

My shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/sarahfogg

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.