zentangle

Coloring Day – 2 August 2017

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Angela Porter National Colouring Day 2018 colouredSmall

The day be soon upon us!  National Coloring day in the USA, but that can apply to the whole world!

In celebration, I’ve created a free coloring template, a partly coloured version of which you can see above.  You can get the template by visiting my facebook page, just click on this link to go directly to the post – Angela Porter Illustrator.

Have fun! I have been – lost several hours colouring in the template, and it’s only about half done, if that!  Yes, I’ve been doing this one digitally, well partly.  The mandala was drawn using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, printed out, and then the doodles and zentangles and so on were drawn using a Sakura Micron Pen.  Scanned the finished image in, cleaned it up in Sketchbook Pro, then started to colour it digitally, and I actually like how the colouring is turning out.  I’m finally getting to a stage where I can say I like what I’m doing … for this style of drawing at least.  Somehow, I think that bold, bright colours with high contrast shadows and highlights to create a strong illusion of depth/dimension is me, and I perhaps need to forgo the desire to do ‘watercolours’…we’ll see in the fullness of time!

Doodles and zentangles…not digital!

Angela PorterLeave a comment

29July2017_AngelaPorter_Minis

That’s right!  Not digital, but drawn using Pitt Artist Pens from Faber-Castell.

Something inside me told me I needed a break from playing around with digital art, and that my pen wielding skills needed a bit of a dusting off.

If anything, drawing digitally has resulted in me being a bit more confident and fluid with my pen strokes.  I also realised that it’s a lot easier for me to work out designs on paper (though I’m not happy with all of the drawings above – a bit out of practice, maybe).

I’m  my latest drawings for the Dover Publications project, I have been drawing out the bare bones of a sketch on paper, scanning in and then working on it digitally.  That has helped me with size and layout of the design for sure.

This makes me hanker after a Surface Studio even more, as I’d be able to work on a digital image at a 1:1 scale for A4 drawings at the very least.

It’s not easy for me, it seems, to get my brain around the the fluidity of scale of drawing digitally as compared to the fixed scale on paper.

All the same, I really enjoyed wielding a pen with creativity on paper rather than screen.  It has it’s own pleasures, and challenges, including having to work with the mark you make when you put ink directly on paper; there’s no easy ‘erase button’ to be used!  So, it’s more about going with the flow and the creative opportunities that the permanency of ink results in (creative opportunities being the positive way to view ‘mistakes’; as I was once told, there’s no mistakes in art, only happy accidents!).

Oh, the boxes on the images.  Well, I do intend to scan these in individually and create files for printing out, the boxes being there where a greeting or message or quote can be placed.

Also, each drawing is approx. 4″ x 4″ (10cm x 10cm)

Butterflies

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Butterfly 3 patterned_AngelaPorter_16June2017Butterfly 8 patterned_AngelaPorter_16June2017

I used Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on my Microsoft Surface Book along with my Surface Pen to add patterns and shading to two of the butterfly outline designs I drew yesterday.  I’m happy with the results.

Today I’ve also created two more dot mandalas, each around 5″ in diameter.  I added some gems to those, as well as to the small dot mandalas I created over the last couple of days.  The sparkle really adds something special to them, and helps to emphasise the circularity of mandala designs.

DotMandala1_16June2017_AngelaPorterDotMandala2_16June2017_AngelaPorterDotMandalaCards_16June2017_AngelaPorter

Dot Mandala Cards, Butterflies and Fungi

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Digital drawings

ButterfliesForMixedMedia_15June2017_AngelaPorter

FungiForMixedMedia_15June2017_AngelaPorter

Over the past couple of days I’ve continued working on my Microsoft Surface Book using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro to create digital images for used in card making and mixed media projects.  IFungi and butterflies have been my chosen subjects, and you can see some of them in the images above.  They’ve also been digitally coloured, though I’ve still got dots and lines to add to them to give more depth and dimension to them.

They’re all now cut out and sitting waiting to be used in various projects.  There’s still more drawings carefully filed away on the Surface Book for future uses…

Dot Mandala Cards

DotMandalaCards2_15June2017_AngelaPorter

DotMandalaCards_15June2017_AngelaPorter

I’ve also have a bit of fun creating some teeny-tiny dot mandalas.  Each card base is just 3″ x 3″ (approx. 7.5cm x 7.5cm).  The black card I used as the substrate is 2½” square (approx. 6.25cm).

The acrylic paints I used are either metallic or pearlescent, so they do catch the light rather nicely.

Poppy capsules mixed media

Angela PorterLeave a comment

IMG_0622

I’ve decided to do my best to be brave and confident and use my own drawings and designs in my mixed media work.  The poppy seed heads and the ‘zentangle’ patterns are drawn by myself.

The inchie with the quote on – creative journey – is milky as the Glossy Accents on the tile hasn’t dried yet, but it will dry clear and glossy.

Here’s a list of the media I used:

  • Papers – 300gsm watercolour paper, cream paper for pencil and pastel work, marker paper, kraft card, mixed media paper
  • Paints – Paperartsy Fresco paints, Liquitex copper paint, Cosmic Shimmer copper iridescent watercolour paint
  • Pens and pencils – Faber-Castell Pitt artist pens, Derwent Inktense
  • Leafy and flower stencils
  • Sizzix Big Shot and dies for cutting some of the gears and an embossing folder to add texture to one of the background papers
  • Metal gears and keys
  • Glossy Accents
  • Cosmic Shimmer acrylic glue
  • Archival Ink in black and sepia
  • Distress inks
  • Spray bottles – one filled with plain water, the other filled with water and copper Perfect Pearl
  • Gems
  • Wow Holographic Sparkle embossing powder and a Versamark pen
  • Cut and dry foam
  • Various brushes

Dragonflies and the New Year

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Dragonflies_AngelaPorter_Artwyrd_1 January 2015

It’s the first day of a new calendar.

Happy 1st of January 2015 to you all and may this day and all that follow be filled with all the love, joy, creativity and good things that each of you deserves so much.

This isn’t quite my first piece of art for this new year; I spent time today completing two pieces of Scandinavian art for Michael O’Mara Books.  I got the 1960s work for them done on Tuesday.  Yesterday was a day where I did some mandalas for the third ‘Color Me’ book to follow on from the huge success of Color Me Calm and Colour Me Happy.

I’m certainly being kept busy with art!

The winter break is nearly over, and all too soon.  It took me over  week to calm down enough that the palpitations from work related stress calmed down and for me to sleep properly once again.

No doubt the manic-ness that is teaching will have me stressed out again, especially as it’ll be crazy with an Estyn inspection in three weeks time.

Taking time to meditate, to create, to write will be so important for me, as it always is, but more so with this added pressure and the fact that I didn’t realise how stressed out I was with work, and how exhausted I was too.

I hope I can stave the exhaustion off for a longer time this coming school term …