robin

Yuletide dangle design

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©Angela Porter 2018

Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice, or Yule. So, I wanted to create a dangle design for Yuletide, and wish you all the blessings of the season.

On the Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, it is the shortest day and from here on in the amount of daylight begins to increase once again, albeit very slowly at first.

People gather at prehistoric monuments, such as Stonehenge, Newgrange and Avebury, to watch the sunrise on this day. These monuments have Winter Solstice alignments. That’s why I’ve got a pair of big stones framing the sun.

Of course I had to include holly, mistletoe and some evergreens in the design, along with stars, hears and a couple of cute robins.

It is a digital piece of art which started life as a pencil drawing on dot grid paper. The design was scanned in and re-drawn using a Microsoft Surface pen on the screen of my Microsoft Studio in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro. I did make use of the mirror symmetry tool to help me with the symmetrical nature of the design. I hand lettered the sentiment in the ribbon.

I did colour this quickly using gradient fills – yesterday I really wasn’t up to doing much. I am feeling a bit better today, though drained after a quick visit to my local town to run a couple of errands. I’m really easy to startle at the moment and me being jumpy at every noise and the number of people out and about was something I kind of expected but hoped I wouldn’t experience today.

I’m safely back home now and am starting to calm down a little, though I feel exhausted. So, the rest of the day will be spent quietly for sure.

I do have a Winter Solstice mandala to share tomorrow, and I’m rather pleased with this one. So, do pop back tomorrow.

‘A Dangle A Day’ is published on 8 Jan 2019.

Noel – Entangled Design

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©Angela Porter, Artwyrd.com

I always have fun when drawing and creating, including this design. In it I’ve combined some of my entangled design elements along with winter/Christmas doodles. 

To start, I hand lettered ‘Noel’ using a guide for the shape of the lettering I wanted. Then, I printed it out so I could add the black and white line art using a 0.8 Uniball Unipin pen.

Once that was done, the finished lineart was scanned back into the Microsoft Surface Studio, a transparent background created and some smudges cleaned up. 

Finally, I could colour it. Today, I chose to use the color gradient tools, which does make the job of colouring a bit quicker, but it also results in a rather ‘shiny’ look too. Or perhaps that’s simply due to the colours I choose for the gradients.

I had fun adding the glowing stars and sparkles to this one, though I’m not sure I’ve got that right.A nice way to spend the morning and early afternoon as the weather has been wet and very windy at times here. 

Another December Dangle Design

Angela PorterLeave a comment

As one of my current goals is to improve my hand lettering I thought it would be fun to practice it with another dangle design.

For this one, I used some dangles from my book ‘A Dangle A Day’ to build the dangle designs with a wintry, Christmassy vibe to the finished design, thanks to the traditional Christmas colours of red, green and gold, along with with some blues, purples and cool pinks thrown in.

Of course, I could’ve chosen a non-traditional series of colours too, for fun. For example, the baubles on the dangles and the wreath could be done in pink, purple and blue. Whatever your decor at this time of the year it can be reflected in your colour scheme for your dangle design.

From the initial sketch to posting it on this blog it’s taken me around 6 hours to complete. 

Yes, I started with a sketch and then inked it in traditionally, pen on paper. I scanned that drawing into GiMP so I could remove the dot grid and the faint echoes of erased pencil lines. This was followed by coloring the image. For this I used marker and blender brushes . The last steps were to add texture to the design, a coloured background, a drop shadow and then the watermarks.

I used a Microsoft Surface Pen, a Microsoft Surface Studio and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to complete the digital colouring and so on.

The charms on the dangles are a lot easier to draw than they appear, it’s the colour that really brings them to life and gives them dimension.

It’s always fun to string charms together to make these dangles. I often tend towards more symmetrical designs, but ones like this are good to do too. They all have their own charm, pardon the dreadful pun there.

I take you designing dangles step by easy step in my book ‘A Dangle A Day‘. There are lots of examples of dangle designs in the book that are ready to use, but it’s easy to rearrange things to suit your particular needs. The release date is 8 January 2019, a new style of creativity to start in the New Year, and throughout the year as all the seasons and many different celebrations are covered in the book, along with suggestions for projects using dangle designs.