Yesterday, I set up a poll in the group so members could vote on options or make suggestions for this week’s template. As you can see, a mandala with a hallowe’en theme, including cats and spider webs, is the result. Of course, there’s some drunken skulls – no party hats this week!
As I created this digitally, I didn’t film the process. I do have, however, a short vlog where I show the uncoloured template and a couple of other pieces of art and waffle on a bit!
My favourite day of the year in my favourite season. I shall be observing it in my own way later on.
However you celebrate this day, as usual or changed as a result of the pandemic, have fun, be safe and be well and may your ancestors watch safely over you all.
It was an All Hallows’ Eve tradition in the UK to lay out places at the dinner table for those who had passed away during the previous 12 months as their one last meal before they finally go to the world of spirit, heaven, or whatever else you may call it. It was this night as it was believed that the veil ‘twixt the living and the dead was at its thinnest and loved ones could return to spend time here on Earth with their families.
This year, sadly, too many have done so as a result Covid-19, which has swept around the world taking far too many needlessly. While we no longer lay places for those who have passed, we can take time to honour their memory, their presence in our lives, how important they were and continue to be to us.
I actually finished colouring in one of my templates for this day. It has turned out both dark and colourful, and cutely spooky. While colouring today, I have been listening to a Hallowe’en playlist on Spotify.
I always have a lot of fun with Hallowe’en themed designs, and this one is no exception. Lots of skulls, potion bottles, eyeballs, ghosts, monsters, pumpkins, toadstools, gravestones, and more!
It’s taken me several hours to colour in just a portion of the design. I’m going to try to finish this one off in time for Hallowe’en.
Drawn with pen on paper, digitally coloured.
The template is available for members of the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group – free to join, and free to download. Terms and conditions for use apply.
A fun, quirky, cute Hallowe’en themed mandala was what was needed on Monday morning.
I started with the skull, without any clue as to what I was going to do with it. Then I thought about adding a mandala around it, and I wanted it in eerie, almost glowing colours.
As I drew the skull without any outlines, I thought I’d do the same for the rest of the mandala. I also kept a pretty simple colour palette – violets, teals and blues.
It’s worked out OK. It certainly is a bit different. The most important thing is that I enjoyed drawing it, and that is most probably the most important thing of all.
Sunshine and mood
Today, there’s some sunshine and that helps to keep my mood up. I did feel a bit better yesterday – sleep and Star Wars really helped! I may have felt better, but settling to art just didn’t happen yesterday.
I’m still so tired. I think it’s all to do with some anxiety at this time. There’s nothing specific for it, just general anxiety. I think it was triggered by my boiler breakdown and then the engineer fixing it, and the increasing cases of Covid combined with a national lockdown in Wales.
I’m not sure I can drive less than a mile to the cemetery I like to walk around. I feel safe there in a way I don’t walking around the streets and town I live in at this time.
Of course, worrying about whether I’ll be breaking the rules to take a walk adds to my anxiety.
What a pickle!
It may be that I baulk and just stay home, and check the rules carefully before I do venture forth for a walk.
Pumpkin knitting
Knitting pumpkins while watching Star Wars. Guaranteed to reduce my anxiety. And knitting, unlike crochet, is something I can do without having to look at my fingers.
Also, I’ve found it really relaxing and the feel of the knitted fabric in my fingers is soothing and pleasurable. As I’ve been kintting in stocking stitch, it’s a very smooth fabric. Crochet tends to have more texture to it. I think I’ll be doing more knitting and less crochet for a while.
A week more of the pandemic has passed us by, and it’s one week closer to Hallowe’en! So, this week’s template for members of the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group is Hallowe’en themed.
I always have fun drawing these cute and whimsical templates. They’re the kind of art that I don’t have to worry too much about my colour choices, which I’m never quite happy with.
As always, I look forward to seeing how people bring my templates to life with colour in their own way.
Can you believe that September is nearly over? I swear that the older I get the faster time seems to go.
Anyway, a new month on the horizon means a new colouring template for the members of the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group. There just has to be a Hallowe’en theme for October’s page, and you can see a sneak peek of it above. I couldn’t resist colouring some of it in as a way of trying out some new digital brushes and some ideas too.
I put some of my favourite All Hallows’ Eve motifs into the drawing, including a raven, skulls, fungi and a vampire cat! I always enjoy drawing stuff to do with Hallowe’en; it’s my favourite time of year because I don’t have any past traumas associated with it.
If you’d like to colour this template, pop over to the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group and become a member; each month I do one drawing exclusively for group members (terms and conditions of use and sharing apply).
About the art
I used a combination of fountain pens and fine-line pens to draw the design on dot grid paper. I then scanned the drawing in and cleaned up smudges and smears digitally.
Then, I set about adding colour digitally using my usual tools – Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio. I also added a background and surface texture that I had purchased via Creative Market.
I am really quite pleased with how the colour is bringing the illustration to life, especially the skull in a jar. I hope to be able to continue to add colour as the month progresses, though I do know I have quite a bit of work to do and focus on.
To Inktober or not Inktober, that is the question.
Last year, I really enjoyed taking part in Inktober. Inktober has become a really popular social media event where artists and creatives use a daily prompt to draw (or create) something based on that prompt and share it on social media.
There is an official prompt list, but people do create alternative lists and I may look at some of them as there may be variations that might be less time intensive than last years’ was!
I shall see what I find and go from there I think.
So, Angela, how are you today?
Tired. However, I’m am quite content, my mood is good enough today. I do have EMDR later on, and I often feel ‘flat’ before my therapy session. I think my unconscious mind starts to bring stuff up in preparation for EMDR.
I know that the likelihood of me being exhausted later is rather high, so I’m not planning to do loads of stuff later on. Self care will be the order of the late afternoon and evening.
It’s All Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en or Samhain as you prefer. It’s also the last day of Inktober 2018. Here is my offering based on the prompt of ‘slice’
Well, it had to be a celebratory slice of cake, complete with a pumpkin candle and all kinds of cutely spooky monsters and critters and so on.
This was, as all have been, fun to do. I quite like the grungy look I’ve achieved with the use of texture brushes and slightly duller colours along with black as a component of the gradients.
I sketched this in pencil on dot grid paper, scanned it in and used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to draw and colour this dangle design.
Yes, it just had to be a dangle design to round off the month of Inktober!
My Microsoft Surface Studio and Microsoft Surface Pens were my magic tools to help me create this.
Now I see it in a smaller size, I can see where some highlights and lowlights would help to increase dimension in places. However, it’ll do as it is as I do have to finish the templates for my new book Entangled Forests. Yes, the cat is out of the bag on the theme of this coloring book for Creative Haven by Dover Publications. You can pre-order it on Amazon and it’s due for release in July of 2019. I should have all the templates completed today, then it’s just colouring a couple of them as examples in the book.
Before this book, Entangled Butterflies is due out in November 2018 and A Dangle a Day in January 2019.
I said (typed?) it yesterday – I’ve enjoyed Inktober, for many reasons, and I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing what I’ve created using the daily prompts.
Oh, as it’s Hallowe’en, there’s a little event going on over on the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group. I provided a hallowe’en themed coloring template at the start of this month and asked everyone to hold off posting their finished versions until today. I’m hoping for a flurry of postings throughout the day to give a lovely, cutely spooky feel to the group throughout this day! I have my own version of the template to post there in a short while too, and I’ll post it here later on today as well.
However you spend your All Hallows’ Eve, have fun and keep safe too!
Autumn is my favourite time of year and Hallowe’en is my favourite ‘festival’. Not the dressing up or trick or treat and rowdiness, though I do appreciate the excitement that the little ones have about the spookiness and slight scariness that it all brings.
I just enjoy the atmosphere at this time of year that the darker nights and changing colours and falling leaves bring. It’s the time of year where I really appreciate candle light during the evenings, creating a cosier environment at home.
There’s a little more to it than that, but I can’t quite find the words for it at the moment.
Anyhoo, this whimsical, cute colouring template is available only to members of the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group. It’s free to join. I create one template a month just for the members (sometimes I surprise them with a second one, and in the run up to Christmas I try to do a couple a week to help with de-stressing). Pop over and join a fair number of like-minded, friendly people.
Can you believe it? September is just about all and over with. Time does seem to be flying by at the moment.
This was a really quick bujo spread due to me being away last week.
It’s also a very messily coloured one. I can tell I’ve barely wielded a pen in the last week! Talk about shaky and wobbly and lacking the fine skills I had.
Goes to show you gotta keep working it daily, even if it’s for a short while.
Mind you, I have new glasses and getting used to them is going to take a little while. For work, I have ‘occupational varifocals’. This means the lenses gradually change from intermediate distance at the top to reading distance at the bottom. I didn’t get to use them much last week, so it’s going to take a little while and some practice with them.
I also have varifocals of the usual kind (distance, intermediate and reading). They’re great if I’m sitting down and out sketching, or drawing, or knitting and watching TV. I find them a bit disconcerting for walking around and going up/down hills or stairs or twisty turny ways they cause me to feel a bit dizzy. I know my problem is that I have really good peripheral vision and there’s a part of the varifocal lens on the outside and innermost areas that causes fuzzy vision.
So, yesterday I took my favourite pairs of glasses which double up as sunglasses (they’re very cleverly designed to have removable polaroid lenses that look like they’re part of the glasses, which essentially they are) to have single vision distance lenses put in them so I can use them for walking around and driving. I can drive with the varifocals, but that fuzzy bit bothers me.
Anyways, I have a lot of practice to do with drawing in the next day or two before I return to my next Entangled Coloring book. I’m half-way through the templates and I have some lovely reference photos from my trip for the next ones, including some ideas inspired by Forbidden Corner, maybe.
Back to the BuJo spread. I drew the design on dot grid paper using Sakura Pigma Micron pens and coloured in with Chameleon pencils.
I like the design, not fussed on my colouring skills today that’s for sure.
What theme should I go with for November? Remembrance, bonfires, fireworks…feel free to leave suggestions!
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.
Can you believe it? September is just about all and over with. Time does seem to be flying by at the moment.
Angela Porter 