Mermay 2019

If you follow me on twitter or instagram you'll know I attempted the Mermay challenge this year! The idea is to draw a mermaid every day during the month of May, not unlike Inktober but with the subject chosen for you instead of the medium. Here are all 31 of my completed mermaids!

I tried my best, but I wasn't quite able to finish these inside May. I fell behind a couple of times and had 3 mermaids left to do in June. I also spent more than one day on the last one, since it was already late.

Since the medium isn't restricted in this challenge I did a lot of experimenting with techniques I might not normally use, mostly colouring with a set of cheap novelty pencils (2, 19, 21, 24 and 27) and trying to paint with water-soluble felt tips (8, 13, 14, 23 and 25). I don't know if the felt tips are ever going to look quite the way I want them to, but I was pleasantly surprised by the kind of results I could get out of the cheap pencils with a little patience. (They don't scan very well though, there isn't enough pigment.)

I'll be printing these in a little zine now that they're all done, so please look out for that!

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!

Sketchbook Flipthrough

A friend of mine gave me this little sketchbook for Christmas last year, and I decided on a whim to try to fill the whole thing before the end of February! Unfortunately the whim hit me on the 12th of February, so I didn't quite make it, but I did finish it in only just over a month.

I'm still feeling inspired to see what I can do with cheaper pens and normal office supplies, so a lot of these are done with biros, gel pens, mini colouring pencils and so on.

(This is the best quality my poor old phone could process, please be nice to it.)

Ghost Stories of M.R. James

I've been working on some new horror illustrations to beef up that section of my portfolio, so here are some illustrations for 5 ghost stories by M.R. James. Surprisingly most of his ghosts are more like monsters than an archetypal 'ghost', they tend to be solid and hairy.

I also noticed the impact of some stories is reduced if you don't share his pathological fear of spiders. Personally, I've found too many spiders in my hair over the years to be frightened of cobwebs.

In order, these are Canon Alberic's Scrapbook, The Ash Tree, O Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas and The Tractate Middoth.

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.

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.

4 Diamonds

Here's the final set of eyes from the 'eyeball sketchbook', it's the Diamonds from Steven Universe, of course. The Diamond Authority is still my favourite part of that cartoon, so I'm happy to finally have a canon character design for all four.

I will admit to being slightly disappointed that White Diamond wasn't a point cut, since it would have been neat if their cut of gem got more modern and refined, but also smaller, as you went down, but oh well.

The previous sets from this sketchbooks were horror deformations, some sci-fi characters, and some fantasy characters.

4 Fantasy Eyes

I realised I had just enough pages left in what has become my 'eyeball sketchbook' to do two more sets of four eyes, so here's four fantasy characters for one of them. An angel, a demon and two fairies.

Previous sets include some horrible eye deformations, and four sci-fi characters.