Spending a lazy Sunday morning (and early afternoon) digitally colouring this drawing and using it as an exercise in learning more about different kinds of brushes in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.
Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio are my other tools for this, though the image was drawn with a Lamy Fountain pen on Rhodia dot grid paper.
I’m finally feeling more settled than I have been all week. Just in time for EMDR tomorrow! Typical. Still, it’s nice to feel settled for sure.
I worked on this mandala over a couple of days. it has a whole range of new motifs in it and is rather organic in nature, with plenty of pods and seeds included. I’m quite happy with it. I think there’s a kind of flow of design and the colours are vibrant enough to please me.
I really wasn’t at all sure about my colour choices as I added colour to the mandala. The beauty of digital art is that it’s much easier to change the colour, which I did do in just a couple of sections. The colour changes means I’m a lot happier with it.
It has no name as I’m not very good at thinking up names for my artwork. Perhaps I should just find some kind of quirky way of lettering or numbering the designs in future.
Drawn and coloured using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pen and Microsoft Surface Studio.
Today I’m feeling really tired and I don’t feel I have many words at the moment – despite what my blog may suggest.
My fingers, hands and wrists are also rather achy which is making typing or drawing (either digitally or traditionally) rather painful. I don’t know what’s caused that. Yesterday I did do a lot of drawing with pencil on paper – sketches for my new book – and a lot of digital art too. No more than I often do though.
I suspect a bit of self-care is needed. I am feeling a bit low. Tiredness doesn’t help, but I’ve slept really well the last couple of days.
Maybe it’s the grey, wet, windy day.
Maybe it’s just emotional weather with no real cause.
Maybe it’s the start of the buildup to EMDR on Monday.
I just know that like the weather my mood will change and brighten.
Another quote from Terry Pratchett. This one from one of my favourite characters – Death. Death tries so hard to understand humanity, yet he gets it both very wrong and quite right at the same time.
I like the way I’ve added colour to my black and white line art in this example, but one day I hope to get around to colouring in the black and white version.
Maybe I’ll print the art out and then colour it in using Chamelon Pen’s ColorTone Pencils, which arrived yesterday.
I have spent some time colouring with them and so far I quite like them.
They are softer than Polychromos and others, but not quite as soft as Prismacolours. They blend quite nicely, and a little help from a blending pencil results in really nice blends.
I like the colour palette; the colours are nice and bright and just the colours I love to use in my art, which is a huge, huge bonus! As I often struggle to choose and use colours in a sensible manner when I have a huge choice, the limited palette of 50 colours is really useful for me, as are the double ended pencils. Being able to flip to add shadow or light is a nice touch, though I would like a bit more contrast between some of the colours as some are a bit too similar.
The leads are a bit thicker than other pencils, such as Prismacolours. However, this makes the barrels of the pencils a bit too thick for a standard pencil sharpener. My Staedtler pencil sharpener – the ones with the handles that you turn around – should cope well with them though.
At a price point of £45 on Amazon.co.uk with free prime delivery I think they’re good value for money, even though you essentially have 50 half-sized pencils. However, the thicker colour leads make up for that to some degree.
I’ve not been able to find out if you can buy individual pencils when some wear down. However, I can’t see that being a big issue as I suspect that I’ll use most of the pencils fairly equally.
I thought I’d revisit the previous quote, alter the words a bit and this is the result.
I used an oldy looking type-writer font for the quote and printed it out, I used a Sakura Pigma Micron PN pen to draw the design around it. I then scanned it in and altered the colours in Autodesk Sketchbook.
I learned a new ‘trick’ when using sketchbook, completely by accident, and it’s one I want to explore a little more in the future, especially for adding gradient colours to black and white work.
This would look lovely printed out and added to my BuJo, or even framed and hung on my wall.
I was contacted by Darya’s mum asking if I’d ‘do a blessing in the style of your cards’.
This is what I did. It’s approx A4 in size.
Art is the Adventure 