Ok, not the best photo in the world, but the octahedron (bipyramidal) was fun to draw, and the colour certainly brought it to life (death?).
Quite apt I’ve done some autumnal themed work on the Autumnal Equinox.
Whimsical
Entangled Icosohedron
Having more fun! This time a 20-sided icosohedron. And I’ve just noticed I lost the plot slightly in creating the montage above – the same image repeated, d’oh go me! First time I’ve ever done a photo montage though, so maybe I can be forgiven!
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Autumnly Entangled 5 and 6
Making stamps and more Autumnly Entangled
Stamp Carving
I woke up the other morning, Thursday I think it was, and had the overwhelming desire to try my hand at carving stamps from rubber blocks again.
I enjoyed doing lino cuts when I was doing my A level in art over a decade ago, well apart from the way my finger and wrist joints would hurt after doing this. So, I thought I’d have a go with soft rubber, and above you can see the first of my efforts.
The weird flower was the first, and I’m not happy with it, though I think it would be fine as a background stamp in mixed media work, maybe.
The other circular stamps followed fairly quickly after that one, but the stylised thistle was one I did this morning. The white rubber discs are made by Essdee, and I used lino and stamp carving tools by the same company.
The leaf, heart and geometric patterns I carved this morning from a different kind of pink rubber: Speedy Carve from Speedball.
Both kinds of carving material were easy to work with, perhaps a little too soft for my liking, but only time will tell. The only other tools I used were a pencil to draw the designs on the stamp carving material and a craft knife to cut the Speedy Carve. Oh, and some sepia Archival Ink from Ranger, and an acrylic stamp block for the circular discs to adhere to while I stamped with them.
Autumnly Entangled
Two more, drawn on paper coloured with Distress Oxide inks, with highlights of white gel pen and metallic gel pens added. Also, the bottom one has had colour added using Zig Clean Colour Real Brush Pens from Kuretake and also some Prismacolour pencils.
I still have two more 10cm x 14cm sheets of coloured paper to draw on… so at least two more to come!
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Autumnly Entangled 1
I’ve had a busy couple of days with this and that and the other.
Yesterday and today it’s been learning about vector files, images, graphics and how to get my artwork done as that kind of file and to a maker so she can use them to laser etch her products – more about this when I have photos of the projects!
Lots of head scratching, googling, and finally settling on downloading a program that works in vector graphics. So, a lot of learning to do with that, but it’s easy, intuitive and makes a lot more sense than Adobe Illustrator; I chose Serif’s Affinity Designer. I don’t know if it is as sophisticated as Illustrator, but I can’t see me wanting to get to that kind of level – I love Autodesk Sketchbook Pro way too much for that!
Certainly a different skill set is needed, but I’ll get there as I usually do.
After all the time on the ‘puter, I had the need to return to traditional media, and the photo above is what I’ve spent my evening doing.
First, the paper (approx. 14cm x 21cm), along with a few other sheets, was coloured with distress oxide inks. Then I drew on it using a mixture of pens.
It was really nice to do, the colours of all the sheets are rather autumnal, and I’m looking forward to drawing on the others over the coming days.
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Autumn is on the way!
Autumn is nigh and it’s a lot more glorious because…
September has arrived at long last, along with the promise of the fiery blaze of glory that is autumn in a few weeks time.
Cooler mornings and evenings along with warm enough days, the quality of sunlight is softer, more golden too.
I really love this time of year, it’s my favourite!
Even more so that I no longer have the long fear/anxiety of returning to school as a teacher.
I don’t miss teaching one little bit! I miss friends I had. I miss the more social interaction I had and the fun and laughter I had with colleagues and pupils. What I don’t really miss is the constant fear, anxiety, worry, stress, pressure, bad attitudes, poor behaviour and constantly being looked at and assessed. All the things that led me to some very dark places that I found difficult to get out of. No, it’s not ‘I don’t really miss’ these things – I really don’t miss these things, though I still get moments anxiety verging on panic when memories of various situations arise from the depths of my subconscious.
Arty pursuits
I’ve finished all the black and white line art for Eerily Entangled – my latest colouring book for Dover Publications. I have two more to colour in for the book, but I’ll wait to see what my editor and her design team would like me to colour – there are so very many, if not all, I’d love to colour!
As well as this, I’ve spent quite a bit of time starting to organise my ‘pattern library’. It’s something I like to do when I’m too tired to do anything else, when I’m feeling down and need a comforting not challenging activity, and when I’m lacking in inspiration; sometimes the patterns bring the inspiration I’m searching for, sometimes they just allow stuff to well up to the surface of my subconscious mind where my conscious mind can grab them and make use of them.
As a change of focus, I decided to draw some autumn themed mandalas, the one at the top of this blog entry being the first.
I’m a bit rusty at creating them after focusing on other things for a while, but the skills soon come back, often with new ideas or twists to old ideas, as well as new skills learned by my use of Autodesk Sketchbook Pro with my Microsoft Surface Book, which I used to create this mandala.
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Cirque-doodle
This is what I’ve done with one of the Distress Oxide coloured circles I blogged yesterday.
It’s essentially finished, though I may add a few metallic highlights, and maybe some drops of 3D Crystal Glaze.
The Distress Oxides give a lovely soft feel to the paper and it is lovely to draw on. The mixed media paper on it’s own is quite hard and bumpy and not a surface I enjoy working on with pen; the Distress Oxides and water spray have changed that.
I still have a few circles to draw on, but shortly I need to turn my attention back to things of an eerie nature.
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Happy Coloring Day 2017!
Have a wonderful day, and find even a few minutes to colour, relax, unwind and calm!
Here’s my finished version of my Coloring Day Template 2017. I’ve enjoyed colouring it, muchly, but now need to turn my attention back to drawing eerie lineart for Dover Publications.
Oh, I coloured it using my Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Book in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. It took around 15 hours or so to complete, I think; I lost time while doing it!
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Coloring Day – 2 August 2017
The day be soon upon us! National Coloring day in the USA, but that can apply to the whole world!
In celebration, I’ve created a free coloring template, a partly coloured version of which you can see above. You can get the template by visiting my facebook page, just click on this link to go directly to the post – Angela Porter Illustrator.
Have fun! I have been – lost several hours colouring in the template, and it’s only about half done, if that! Yes, I’ve been doing this one digitally, well partly. The mandala was drawn using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, printed out, and then the doodles and zentangles and so on were drawn using a Sakura Micron Pen. Scanned the finished image in, cleaned it up in Sketchbook Pro, then started to colour it digitally, and I actually like how the colouring is turning out. I’m finally getting to a stage where I can say I like what I’m doing … for this style of drawing at least. Somehow, I think that bold, bright colours with high contrast shadows and highlights to create a strong illusion of depth/dimension is me, and I perhaps need to forgo the desire to do ‘watercolours’…we’ll see in the fullness of time!
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Doodles and zentangles…not digital!
That’s right! Not digital, but drawn using Pitt Artist Pens from Faber-Castell.
Something inside me told me I needed a break from playing around with digital art, and that my pen wielding skills needed a bit of a dusting off.
If anything, drawing digitally has resulted in me being a bit more confident and fluid with my pen strokes. I also realised that it’s a lot easier for me to work out designs on paper (though I’m not happy with all of the drawings above – a bit out of practice, maybe).
I’m my latest drawings for the Dover Publications project, I have been drawing out the bare bones of a sketch on paper, scanning in and then working on it digitally. That has helped me with size and layout of the design for sure.
This makes me hanker after a Surface Studio even more, as I’d be able to work on a digital image at a 1:1 scale for A4 drawings at the very least.
It’s not easy for me, it seems, to get my brain around the the fluidity of scale of drawing digitally as compared to the fixed scale on paper.
All the same, I really enjoyed wielding a pen with creativity on paper rather than screen. It has it’s own pleasures, and challenges, including having to work with the mark you make when you put ink directly on paper; there’s no easy ‘erase button’ to be used! So, it’s more about going with the flow and the creative opportunities that the permanency of ink results in (creative opportunities being the positive way to view ‘mistakes’; as I was once told, there’s no mistakes in art, only happy accidents!).
Oh, the boxes on the images. Well, I do intend to scan these in individually and create files for printing out, the boxes being there where a greeting or message or quote can be placed.
Also, each drawing is approx. 4″ x 4″ (10cm x 10cm)
Art is the Adventure 