Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Weekly Drawing - Nightlight Naps


Title: Nightlight Naps
Size: 6 by 12 inches
So this isn't technically a weekly drawing, as I haven't been doing them each week, but it is a short piece I did this week - and it essentially has the same purpose as my weekly drawings did. That being said, here's a short piece I did of Nightlight (from William Joyce's Guardians of Childhood series) catching a quick nap. It's done in pen and watercolor. 

Nightlight is one of favorite characters to draw, thanks to his fun hair and otherworldly armor, but I hadn't drawn him recently. Coloring the armor was an interesting challenge, as it needed to be black, but you needed to be able to make out the tangle of limbs. I like how it came out.

Picture book - Coloring pages 11-12

Well! Here we are at the last two pages of the Kitten in the Orchestra Pit picture book. Maas and Amalie finally found each other. These pages are still unfinished, and though I like how they're coming out, I'm still not quite satisfied with either frame, so I haven't moved on to colored pencil or the second layer of pen.

At this time, I turn to you, any readers out there, for advice on what to touch up on these final frames before I put on the final layer of pen and colored pencil. Thoughts? Ideas? Impressions? Feel free to leave a comment.

To check out the rest of the progress on the picture book, look at my Picture Book label (at the very bottom of the post).


Watercolor Studies - Miraculous Ladybug Color Practice

After briefly starting pages 11 and 12 of the picture book, which include a person, I remembered that watercoloring people is considerably harder than watercoloring cats. And so I decided to practice on some doodles of characters from the show Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir.

Title: Miraculous Watercolors
Size: Each character is about 3 by 2 inches
This was a fun, if quick, project. I think my favorite to paint was Alya (the girl in glasses).


Alya was fun to paint for so many reasons. Her hair, for one, has an interesting fading pink. Her eyes are a light hazel sort of grey/brown. And her shirt! I've never painted something plaid before, but it was a blast. I had to break it down into layers of stripes, then paint accordingly. It was actually easier than the few times I've done plaid in colored pencil, which was a pleasant surprise. Usually I have more trouble with paint than pencil.

Adventures in Cooking - "Sconuts"

This week, as a break from picture books and 2D media in general, I made several batches of scones. Typically, I just made them round, but in this case, I tried shaping them like donuts (hence the name "sconuts"). Once I tried shaping the scones into hearts, stars and various other shapes, but it was too time consuming to make it worth doing every time.

Cooking and baking are a rather different than drawing and paint, but I really enjoyed myself (and the scones). It's an interesting to create something for this class that's gone so quickly. Most things I make (paintings, sketches) last for quite a while, and I can go back and look at them any time, but with scones, all that lasts is the memory of the process and taste. It's a fascinating parallel to my typical 2D pieces.