Autumn

Dangle Day Friday

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Angela Porter September 2018 coloured

Friday is dangle day!

We’re a week into September and autumn is nearly here in the Northern hemisphere, so I thought my dangle design should be one for this season. I think this would be a lovely BuJo page to separate the autumn months. I also think it would make a pretty notecard or greetings card. The hand lettering could be changed for another sentiment and it would be suitable for an autumn celebration. Alternatively, it would look great framed and hung as part of a quartet of designs that cover the four seasons; now there’s a project for me to do!

I drew the design on squared paper using Sakura pigma micron pens.

Then, I scanned the image in, used GiMP to remove the squares and create a transparent background

Next, I used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to colour the image, create the textured background and add a shadow to the design.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I love autumn! I love the way the world changes in terms of colours over the space of a few weeks, and the colours can be absolutely glorious.

I don’t know how the long, very hot and dry summer in here in the UK will affect autumn this year.

If you would like to design some dangles and not quite sure how, then my upcoming book A Dangle A Day (available for pre-order) will lead you through the steps as well as giving you plenty of ideas for dangle design.

Friday freebie

Just a reminder that today is the last day for you to enter any of my giveaways, the prizes being signed copies of Eerily Entangled Art, my latest book in Dover’s Creative Haven series of coloring books.

See my previous blog post for details on how to enter.  I’ll be drawing the winners at random tomorrow evening, UK time.

Furbaby Friday

Over on the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group, it’s furbaby friday.

Of course, it’s Furbaby Everyday over on the Happy Tails Animal Group facebook group.

Both groups would love to see your pictures of your furbabies, as would I.

Hello September!

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Angela Porter September Template 2018 small

September 2018’s coloring template

A new month begins and a coloring template for September 2018(above) for the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group is now available.

If you’d like to access to September 2018’s uncoloured template, which is exclusive to members of the group, just wander over to the group, join and download. Please note, that terms and conditions do apply.

I drew this in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on my Microsoft Surface Studio using my Microsoft Surface Pen.

Autumn is a-coming!

With the calendar turning to September, my heart lifts with the expectation of the glory of nature as autumn asserts it’s influence.

It’s my favourite season of the year. I love the bright, vivid colours that replace the darker, duller greens of summer. Nature’s picks out it’s most glorious paintbox and sets the world alight in fiery autumnal hues.

I also luxuriate in the cooler evenings and mornings and look forward to waking up to see dew, or even frost, on Binky, my Smartcar.

The fresh, clean, clear air that the turning season brings blows away the dustiness of the hot, dry summer.

There’s also the return of the pleasure and comfort of snuggling up under a duvet as night time is cooler. Not to mention the relief of sleeping well throughout the night.

There are other things I’m looking forward to this year too.

It’s hard to remember now the fear and trepidation that the return to school as a teacher that would come with the start of this month as the new school year starts.

Now, I look forward to the start of the new school year as the world is calmer, quieter during the school day and I can begin to venture forth from my home without my CPTSD panic kicking in when I hear the sound of teenagers shouting and arguing and swearing and being belligerent, just them being themselves really.

It’s not their fault, I know, but their sounds are triggers for my fear, anxiety, panic and cause me to want to hide in a quiet dark corner of my safe home. So much so, that I find it so difficult to venture out of my front door during daytime during the school holidays.

Through therapy, I will overcome this, but the reaction is so ingrained in me and goes right back to my earliest years; teaching, dealing with the dramas of teens on a daily basis as well as being the focus for some to vent their anger, just reinforced these automatic responses. This means not just unraveling the web of trauma that resulted in the panic response, it means learning a healthy response to such triggers, one that I’ve never, ever had in the first place.

Now, with the start of the school year, and a daytime world that is quieter, I’ll be able to find my courage to venture forth during the day once again. Maybe not often, but from time to time.

With it being my favourite season, with the theme of my next book being forests, to sketch and find inspiration in woods and forests during autumn is something I want to do this year.

It’s all part of my road to recovery from CPTSD. Autumn always feels like a time of new starts, more so than New Year. As nature begins to shed what is unnecessary so survival through winter is possible, so I work on shedding the trauma that has kept me in a metaphorical winter in terms of my mental and emotional health for a very, very long time.

 

 

BuJo September 2018

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Angela Porter Bujo Sept 2018

It’s nearly the end of August so it’s time for my BuJo pages for this month.

I used Tombow Dual Brush Pens and a Chameleon Detail Pen for these pages in my Leuchtturm 1917 dot grid notebook.

My colour scheme is quite autumnal as September is the month of the Autumn Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere.

I’ve used a simple dangle design for the Monthly Cover Page. My tutorial book, A Dangle A Day takes you through dangle designs step by step and has lots of ideas for charms and dangles. It’s available for preorder now.

I kept the monthly planner simple as that really suits my needs.

For my mood tracker, I used leaves, acorns and seeds, perfect for an autumn theme. I’ve not added colours to my key yet, but I will. I may add more leaves and seeds as the month goes on and I fill in the elements I’ve already drawn. Or maybe I’ll add some autumnal quotes instead. I’ll let my mood and the events in the month dictate what I do.

Friday is Dangle Day!

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Angela Porter Artwyrd 29 March 2018 Dangle Cards

Angela Porter Artwyrd 29 March 2018 Dangle Cards1

That’s right!  From henceforth Friday shall be known as Dangle Day.  Well, on my blog and the other places I can be found on the interwebs.

As you may know, I have a book coming out later this year that’s all about drawing dangle designs; it’s called A Dangle A Day and is available to preorder now.  In it, I’ll be leading you through, step by step, drawing dangle designs, amongst other things, so you too can create dangle designs like these!  Yes, you can do it!

So, I plan to post at least one completed dangle project each Friday, and this week there’s a bumper crop of five of them.

The cards I’ve made over the last day or two are dangle designs, but not ones to be found in the book. These are all drawn with pen on paper and coloured with either Tombow Dual Brush pens or Kuretake’s Zig Clean Colour Brush Pens.  I’ve also added dots and highlights using Sakura’s Metallic and Stardust Gelly roll pens, not that you can easily see them in the photos.

I will, in the near future, have an announcement to make about a giveaway.

Digi Hallowe’en Pumpkin Stamp set

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I have a set of 13 digi stamps with a whimsical Hallowe’en Pumpkin theme available in my Etsy shop, Artwyrd.

The set includes :

  • 3 pumkins without faces
  • 5 faces to add to the pumpkins or any other images you wish ( spooky eyes in the dark, on monsters, ghosts, aliens…your imagination is the only barrier!)
  • 5 leaves to use to create an autumn/fall scene with or without the pumpkins

Use them to create cards, or to fill a page with images for a custom colouring page, or any other craft you can think of.

 

Autumnly Entangled 7 to 11

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Lots of drawing done over the past three or so days and I haven’t had a chance to upload these.

The set of four are approx. 4″ square and the paper has been coloured with distress inks.

The bigger one is drawn on ombre paper for ‘scrapbookers’.  The central image is 6″ square.  It was a bit of a ‘mare to draw; the paper isn’t absorbent and the ink takes ages to dry, which means smudging was a bit of a problem, but I’ve managed to mostly disguise it with patterns.   I need to dry different pens on this paper, as I do like the colours.  If I can’t find a way to draw on it, then I’ll be using it to mount other artwork on and in mixed media and card making endeavours.

Yes, it did seem a good idea at the time!  It could be back to colouring all my own paper again ….

Making stamps and more Autumnly Entangled

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dav

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

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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!

Autumnly Entangled 2

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AutumnlyEntangled2_AngelaPorter_14Sept2017

This morning, I spent time with pens and paper coloured with Distress Oxides, and this entangled creation appeared.  I may need to add some shading to it … but that can wait as I think I have a big vector drawing to do and that will take all of my concentration.

Autumnly Entangled 1

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AutumnlyEntangled1_AngelaPorter_14Sept2018

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.

Autumn is on the way!

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Autumn Mandala 01Coloured Angela Porter

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.