Drawn with a Tombow Fudenosuke (hard) pen on A4 11¾” x 8¼” Winsor and Newton Bristol Board.
I worked on this one over three days, both to get used to working with the Fudenosuke pen but also for some self-soothing self-care.
It does need some colour and I think I may try a more vintage/distressed/grungy color palette with it, once I get round to adding color.
At the moment, my focus is on colouring the sample colored templates for my latest book for Dover Publications Creative Haven Series –Entangled Christmas.
I’m feeling more content today and less exhausted too, which is a good thing after this weeks rather intense EMDR session.
Today’s been a tough day emotionally for me. Monday is, usually, EMDR day, and today’s was really emotionally upsetting. The memory I’m using led to quite a few insights that caused some distress, which was at a 7 out of 10 at the start and went up to 10 at the end of the session. This happens. I have a lot to think about and process before my next session in a fortnight.
I’m absolutely exhausted. I did have a sleep when I got home, but I’m still exhausted.
I’ve tried to sit and draw and I’m not able to work in a manner that is satisfactory to me. So, I thought I’d set up a colour palette in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and colour the drawing from yesterday. Well, more like start to colour it.
Oddly, I’ve gone for rather muted, vintage colours in this one. Perhaps a reflection of how I feel. Or, maybe it goes with the lino cut ‘feel’ of this particular drawing with the strong, black lines.
Tomorrow, I hopefully start to colour in some of the templates for my next coloring book. My editor and her team at Dover Publications Inc have chosen their favourites. I do intend to give you some sneak peeks as the coloring progresses.
My tools for drawing this image were a Tombow Fudenosuke pen and a pencil. To colour it I’m using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and Microsoft’s Surface Pen and Surface Studio.
I’ve had a lovely, quiet Sunday and I’m glad to say my emotional wellbeing is better than yesterday. Still a bit fragile, but there’s that hint of contentment that has been lacking over the past few days.
I’ve even had my oompf back to draw. This took the guise of adding patterns and outline drawings to my visual reference journal, and then using some of these ideas, plus some old favourites, in this drawing. I even added some dangles in places. Just little, delicate dangles, but still there’s dangles there.
For the drawing, I used a hard nib Tombow Fudenosuke pen. This has a flexible nib, not overly flexible, and so I could vary line weight while drawing.
I was inspired to try the Fudenosuke pen again after my experiments with digital brushes that vary line width with pressure and found that so much fun.
I found it much easier to use the Fudenosuke pen after my experience with digital brushes; it turns out working digitally does influence my work in traditional media and helps me gain new skills or confidence in new media.
I drew this design on an A5 piece of Winsor and Newton Bristol Board which is white and very smooth. Then, scanned it in and digitally added a background texture and some colour, along with my watermarks.
The drawing was mainly to try out the Fudenosuke pen, but also a bit of quiet self-care too. I’m quite happy with it, especially as it’s main purpose was to explore using the pen for drawing with.
I’ve relied on line weight to add some dimension to the drawing, though some colour and/or shading could help a lot. Maybe that’ll be my next task with this – to colour it either digitally or to use my Chameleon DuoTone and Color Tops marker pens after I print the image out.
I’ve really not been myself the past few days. With a couple of busy days this week, the emotional fallout from EMDR on Tuesday finally caught up with me as I slowed down Thursday afternoon. I’m so tired, and my mood isn’t the brightest to say the least.
It’s always a sign that even when I’m tired I can usually draw and create, but not much this week. I haven’t been able to find the inspiration to draw, nor have I found the interest or energy.
Today, around a meeting, I managed to draw this.
It’s a throwback to the more familiar art of earlier days. It has given me a chance to use some new motifs, as well as some favourite ones that crop up often.
The process of drawing was soothing, and I did my very best not to be too judgemental, though I did want to throw it out and restart several times as I wasn’t at all happy with what was coming out of the nib of my fountain pens or Uniball Unipins.
I switched to the Uniballs as the fountain pen ink was smudging lightly. I’ve fixed that, mostly, by digital wizardry. I also added the Distress Ink background digitally.
I know my inspiration and energy to draw will return, I’m just not feeling at all myself at the moment.
I do have a new self-care activity, which is sitting in/on the bed, crocheting shawls and listening to audiobooks – currently working my way through the Harry Potter series.
The rhythmic nature of crocheting is soothing. The familiarity of the Harry Potter story is also soothing. Being upstairs makes me feel safe, secure and it’s also comforting.
The memory being worked on in EMDR certainly has stirred some stuff up. I’ve had some very upsetting insights into how I’ve viewed myself. Releasing the trauma associated with this particular memory will be accompanied by a better view of myself. I may not fully believe it, but if I can believe a little of it then that is good enough for now.
I have to believe that with each memory and its associated traumatic experiences that are processed via EMDR I’ll believe the healthier, more positive statements about myself more and more.
These are some quotes I’ve found recently that are helpful to me in understanding me, helping me through this.
Trauma creates changes you don’t chose. Healing is about creating change that you do choose.
What happened to you was not your fault. The struggles you have today, like your cPTSD symptoms, are a normal response to abnormal events. So, please be kind to yourself.
The poison leaves bit by bit, not all at once. Be patient. You are healing.
Creating this mandala has had me smiling. Gentle smiles on my face and in my heart. There’s something about the graphic black and white, the grey foliage in the background and the mystical, magical moonlight illuminating the design. I look at it and I feel a sense of achievement and satisfaction with this one. It’s not perfect. There’s things I want to do with it, and working digitally allows me to do that. However, for now, it’s more than good enough. I need more tea and a bit of a break from it.
I have to say that it looks really nice in just black and white. but, the simple gradient background really sets the atmosphere for the design. I did use a gradient fill tool to create the coloured background, but I do want to go back and create one that I can have a bit more control over for sure, maybe using watercolour brushes to do that, and adding spots of glow too.
I’m really pleased with the lighter foliage in the background, adding depth and dimension to the design, adding interest. It’s delicate and ephemeral, misty too.
I want to try not letting the background colour the motifs. That’ll involve me adding white to the white spaces. For some reason I created them with transparent ink.! No great problem to go back and sort that out though.
I also want to try working on a landscape that isn’t a mandala, using the same kind of style of drawing and adding magical, mystical coloured backgrounds.
But overall, I’m pleased with this and I’m pleased with the progress I seem to be making in both digital art and in developing my art ‘voice’.
There’s been quite a few pieces of art I’ve created that have made me smile recently – many of my mandalas and entangled drawings, my cute kitty ‘cartoons’ spring to mind, especially one I did of the pink anti-stigma badger as a Jedi knight!
I can honestly say that this mandala, and my previous one, have made me smile more than most.
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!
This was a fun one to draw – Faber-Castell Broad pen on paper. Scanned in to the Surface Studio to clean it up and print it out so I could colour it using Chameleon Color Tone and Color Tops marker pens.
I added some highlights with a white Sakura Gelly Roll pen.
I’m a bit later than usual posting the Inktober image today. I had quite a few errands to run today, including a slightly worrying recall to the opticians for photographs or my eyes, even though I only had them done around 4 weeks ago. It wasn’t pictures of my retina and optic nerve the optician wanted – it was images of the front of my eyes due to me having a wobbling blood vessel in one.
I had planned on popping into the opticians as I’d managed to drop one pair of distance glasses on a tarmac floor and had chipped the lenses (which I’d had for less than a week!) and so needed to have replacement lenses. That was the easy part…
They had trouble getting the camera to work to take pictures of the front of my eyes, so I have to have the process done on Saturday when I pick up my glasses with the new lenses in as the optician will have set the camera up. If it still won’t work, she’ll inspect my eyes with a ‘slit test’ I think it was.
I’ve never had such thorough eye tests/examinations before. I’m well impressed! And it’s with Specsavers! I’ve never had an optician comment on my differently pigmented eyes before either – one eye is mostly a light brownish-green with a small wedge of brown, the other is about half brown and the rest the same light brownish-green as t’other eye.
Someone I met a long time ago described me as having ‘mutant eyes’ and asked if he could use them for a character in a sci-fi book he was writing. I didn’t have a problem with that!
Oh, they have no effect on my vision at all. It’s just a different level of pigmentation that has been, as far as I know, always there.
I also found out this time that my optic nerves are tilted a bit more upwards than is usual but it doesn’t affect my vision, just something noted of curiosity.
Perhaps this is why there’s an eyeball or two appearing in my latest drawings!
Anyways, my eyesight functions very well, apart from the need for glasses as I’ve aged. I’m sure the wobbling blood vessel isn’t anything to worry about either.
I’ve also ordered some beaded ‘chains’ to attach to my glasses so they don’t fall off my nose when I’m looking down again!
So, an unexpectedly extended visit to the opticians along with some shopping in the local town put me all out of sync today, but if nothing else I got my Inktober challenge of the day done!
I couldn’t draw anything cruel – not in my nature to do so, it upsets me so much. So, I chose to go with a quote about ‘cruel’ that is a positive one:
‘Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness.’ – Katherine Henson
I see too much cruelty in this world and I really do not want to add to it.
So, I drew something pretty, with whimsically cute critters and monsters and design elements and patterns that make me smile.
I drew this design on Frisk Bristol board using Faber-Castell Broadline and Fineline pens, scanned it in and then just added a background gradient in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. I’ll get around to colouring it in properly later, I hope…
I really do need to spend some time today on the Entangled coloring book that I’m a little more than half-way through.
Doing these Inktober challenges is helping remind me of where I think some of my drawing skills and my style or ‘voice’ lies. I hope I can translate this into some templates for the coloring book in progress. I can’t work in the cute critters/monsters as I have in this and some other previous Inktober challenges, but I can work with the other elements I’m sure.
I’m also feeling more confident with my line drawing skills after feeling distinctly wobbly and out of practice after a week away without any drawing being done.
I’m also a little less emotionally tired today. I’m surprised yet not surprised at how much the anti-stigma talk and EMDR therapy drained me this week.
I went with one of my favourite things to draw – fungi, in this case poisonous ones. I also added a few seeds, foliage and petals.
Drawn with Sakura Pigma Micron 05 and Uniball Unipin 0.2 pens on Daler-Rowney mixed media paper. I used cool grey Copic markers to add shading.
Oh, I cut the paper to 4″ x 4″ in the hope it would make relatively short projects for me; this took nearly 2 hours to draw/shade!
I’m not happy with some of the textural/shading black lines, especially on the underside of the turny-uppy ‘shrooms. This drawing really does, I think, need more colour!
I thought I’d try to stick to the original precepts of Inktober and work in black ink only, but then added shading with copics, and then feel colour is needed!
It’s a good start, and is helping me get back into the flow of drawing again.
I’ll be working on Day 2 – Tranquil, later on today, and I think I may create a mandala for that. Tempted with working digitally, but may do one on paper with pen … we’ll see on that one I think.
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.
Art is the Adventure 