It has been a long time since I’ve participated in Illustration Friday, (past efforts) but it is a great challenge to play in with some absolutely fantastic artists participating, so I’ve been looking for some inspiration in response to their challenges for some time now. I finally was determined enough to sit down and actually work at it and I came up with a little Life Inspired to hopefully be a vague answer to the challenge word ‘teacher’.
I have two sketches this week to submit for Sunday Sketches. The first is the second in the new series of ‘Life inspired’ scribbles I’m doing. The second sketch…well, I’ll let you make up your mind about that one.
For quite some time now I have been admiring pen and watercolourists like Tracey Fletcher King and Blue Chair Diary Illustrations and their techniques of mixing these two wonderful media. I have never attempted watercolour and pen together before and since my watercolour experience is minimal, I tend to find that part of the equation quite scary.
I had several technical difficulties with this piece as it is a very new medium to me. I made some dumb-ass mistakes, but I’ve learnt and hopefully won’t do them again.
I had nothing tonight for Sunday Sketches, but I did have about an hour to come up with something, despite being exhausted. I found myself playing. I didn’t know what to draw initially (though it is not like I don’t have a pile of unfinished works lying around, but hey, my thought capabilities at the moment are on par with fencing post, so I figured I shouldn’t attempt to ruin anything), so I got out my watercolour pencils and just drew whatever came to mind.
It has been a while since I’ve attempted an Illustration Friday topic, and in the past all my entries have been paintings. But yesterday I needed a prompt to try something out, and I happened to remember that this week’s IF was bicycle. So we have bikes.
As a bonus, I started reading one of my watercolour painting books, and encountered the technique of lifting off. The book basically described how you can lift off paint by wetting the dried paint with a brush and then blotting with tissue. When I experimented with acrylic glazing, I wiped the glaze with a cloth before it could dry properly to give it texture. I pondered if I could get an interesting effect using the lifting off technique combined with the scrubbing on the petals in this piece.
I spent tonight tidying up my art corner in order to fit the primed boards inside the house. Since we had children and lost the two spare rooms, everything that didn’t migrate to the rubbish bin ended up out in the hobby room. The hobby room which houses two computers, a display case, four bookcases, two cupboards, six desks, a filing cabinet, a set of art drawers and a sewing machine cabinet, is starting to become crowded. I’m having the problem of needing to put away things that have no place to go. And since I’ve been neglecting things like housework so I can art…well, let’s say it wasn’t a pretty sight.
When I came to do the red centres of the flowers (around the yellow eye), I had to switch from watercolour pencil to watercolour paint because as with my pastel sticks, my red watercolour pencils are annoyingly hard and often scratch the surface of the paper. Do any of you ever encounter this problem? I find it very frustrating, to the point I can’t use my reds.
