sweets

Hello December!

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Hello December! ©Angela Porter | Artwyrd.com

With a new month comes a new colouring template for the members of the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group, and above is my partly coloured version of it.

Of course, December brings Christmas and the start of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Familiar motifs are stars, hearts, holly, fir trees, gifts, sweet treats, poinsettias, Santa hats, baubles. I’ve included these in this month’s coloring template, though there are many more motifs to consider – ivy, bells, angels, hot chocolate, socks, gloves, scarves, hats, ice skates, sleighs, reindeer, pine cones, fairy lights, to name but a few.

If you’d like to download and print this template then pop along to the facebook group. It’s free to join and free to download the template. All I ask is that you follow the terms and conditions of use and don’t share the uncoloured template. A mention of myself as the artist would be most welcome when you share your gloriously coloured version.

Happy coloring!

Inktober 2018 Day 31 ‘Slice’ and Happy All Hallows’ Eve!

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Angela Porter Inktober 2018 Day 31 Slice

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!

Inktober 2018 Day 18 ‘Bottle’

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Angela Porter Inktober 2018 Day 18 Bottle

Not just one bottle, but several!

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!

October’s Bujo Spread

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Angela Porter October BuJo Spread 2018Can 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!