Catching up.

I've had this arm length to do list for a few months now... all I seemed to be doing was adding to it and this week I've finally managed to tackle it.

My bird nerd self has also been released on the world once more and they have taken over my creative life. Firstly I've been desperately trying to develop a looser style to doodle ideas with. I tend to work fast but with a lot of detail, at times this can end with what looks extremely scruffy. Of course doodles are scruffy but I wanted it to feel better and not leave me cringing every time I flicked through a sketch book. This is what happened.

A chat with my OH lead to the idea of taken a traditional scene of a blue tit on a milk bottle and replacing the bottle with a coke bottle. It was very quick and not perfect and... glass bottles are not a simple task! But I'm really pleased with the style I managed and have been keeping the feel throughout my work this week.

I also got captured by finches (one of my favourite types of bird!) It all started with the idea of making a repeat pattern involving colourful finches... that then started me off drawing many many finches... I'm now creating a flock of over 30 finches!

The first image shows the draft idea sketches I made, they ended up working so well I've had lots of trouble recreating them!

The finches featured include the zebra finch, owl finch, gouldian finch, bullfinch, goldfinch, star finch, java finch and strawberry finch, in case anyone was interested and nerdy like myself!

This is where things got tricky... I started transferring designs to watercolour paper to try painting them... I really didn't like how they were turning out and got quite grumpy at them for not following in the footsteps of there predecessors :P
So instead I got out my bristol board and began making more lineart for more finches, this time I plan to colour them with coloured pencil like the original idea.

As you can see here I have around 20 finches to colour! And the added flying rat with balloons... you know, because who wouldn't?

It's been an extremely hectic week with lots of the boring paperwork involved but I've also managed to get two new designs up on redbubble!!

First design is a remake of my British garden birds, I took a lot of time arranging them so they would work as a repeat design and I'm really happy with the finished design and love how it looks on all the products, this is just one of them.

You can get this design here!

The second design is something I've been playing with for a while now but I kept making them too detailed so today I decided to sit down and simplify the design and this is what happened, the moment I added the lovely purple the design came alive! Here is just one product showing the design, it's definitely a favourite of mine now.

You can get your paws on this design here!

My redbubble store gets updated monthly so please check out my designs here

To keep up to date on my creative endeavors or just the crazy life I lead check out my instagram, link to the right --->

COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN CONTACT ME HERE

ALL MY DESIGNS ARE CURRENTLY AVAILABLE THROUGH MY REDBUBBLE SHOP

Thanks for reading and for the wonderful support I recieve! I'm now off on a well needed holiday for a week (I'm still available to contact)

So have a wonderful end to your August and may the birds sing loudly for you!

BYE!!

The day of challenge

Lately I've been so wrapped up in designs and business that I haven't given myself the chance to sit down and just do art.
So I gave myself a free day today to do just that... but not just that, that with a twist.
I decided to use mediums I rarely ever use, these being charcoal and pastels.

I love how messy both these mediums can be and how soft they are but they both tend to have a life of their own and that leave me a bit flustered as I have control issues over my work so the moment a clean edge moves and becomes fuzzy is a moment where I just stare in horror and wonder whether to give up then and there.

So when I say challenge, I mean challenge.

I started with a crow and a variety of charcoal sticks I found lying around from my school days (10 years old!) and found a kneadable eraser and got to work... the outlines went great, the sketch was good, I was on form today and then... I scrubbed charcoal over the top like I would normally... It seemed more like hard graphite than charcoal which I tried to ignore and then I tried the eraser... whoever made this eraser didn't understand what kneadable erasers were... they thought it meant soft rubber maybe... Whatever it was, it was not kneadable and didn't realise it was meant to lift the charcoal from the paper.
This... was a problem.
I was left with this in it's biggest ugly stage.

Now the thing to remember with artwork is that everything goes through an ugly stage, something that many people don't realise.

I can promise you now, good art does not look good from the start, it hits a lot of ugly before hitting the good look.

Anyway! I decided to just work completely in charcoal and see what I could save after the small bad tools moment.

A few hours later and I had this...

I haven't used charcoal for a good few years, probably over five so this was testing and involved a lot of learning. It was also a lot of fun, even though charcoal can be a pain at times it's also very flowing and fun to scribble and smudge.

After the fun smudging I decided I wanted to continue the mess but with more colour so out came the soft pastels... something I love to look at but struggle to use.

This guy went through many many ugly stages but I didn't get any pictures and they were so bad I think they may break things.

But after a good few hours of mess, grumbles, yays and happies I finally came eye to eye with this guy!

He's not perfect but he does look like a macaw and he is probably the best pastel illustration I've created so I'm quite happy with this guy.

Thanks to my bird loving grandad I myself am quite obsessed with them and he brought me up to love parrots of all kinds. He always wanted a macaw so it just felt right to illustrate one :)

So that was my long challenge day, I haven't finished and hope to continue the random mediums for the next week or so just to see what happens. It's become a fun experiment!

June Update

This is just a quick update, I will do my best to keep it short!

Firstly the design above is now available to buy on my redbubble shop!

It's a fun design I first came up with a year or so ago for a competition I wanted to enter. Unfortunately the competition needed three similar designs and at the time I could only come up with these guys. As a result they ended up inked and then left at the bottom of a drawer. 

I found them yesterday and decided now was their time to strut! So they got their watercolours on and got ready to strut.

I love corvids in general (the crow family) and Jackdaws have to be one of my favourites, they're so chirpy and chatty and have the most intense look on their faces as they strut around looking for food or trouble. I couldn't help but draw them. I remember at the time I almost filled up a whole sketchbook of the strutting mischiefs! That was a fun bit of research although it did lead me to learn that the internet is lacking images and videos of birds walking!

So if you're interested go take a closer look here!

The other update is that I am back open for commissions!

The only thing is I'm going to have to up my prices in the near future due to me charging too little for the work I do!

So I'm doing two last months with the prices as they are, in August the prices will rise (slightly!) 

So if you're looking for a pet portrait! Get in touch!

My current prices are as follows:-

A5 - £15

A4 - £20

A3 - £30

I work in watercolours and inks, sometimes with coloured pencils thrown in and do sizes, A5 A4 and A3. These are then posted to you.

All I need is at least one good photo of your pet (more if your pet has specific markings) and I can get to work. I will also draw any pet from a stick insect to a great big shire horse!

So if you're interested get in touch by going here!

(Examples of previous commissions below)

Hope you're all having a wonderful week! Time for me to get back to scribbling!

So, holiday slightly interrupted

I know, I said I would be away for a week... that was before a wonderful parcel arrived.

After finding out I'd uploaded designs to redbubble my mum couldn't wait to dive in and get her paws on some cushion covers. She nags me to do designs for her or to get things printed and I'm a bit rubbish and never get around to it... oops! So she decided to do it herself and ordered these babies.

I'm not quite sure who was more excited when we opened up the parcel! Pure excitement was just flooding through me as I saw the ratty people design.
I am really impressed by the quality of the material and the print itself, it's perfect!

And of course the model had to pose beside his new pillow... unfortunately he was sleepy and really didn't want to pose much :D

And here's a closer look at the ratty people design. I have to admit this is probably my favourite of these three designs just because they came out so damn well and well, it's perfect :P The real rats are not allowed to pose with their cushion though due to the odd piddle that would not go down well!

My mum also surprised me with a late birthday present. You may remember the corvus constellation piece I made a few weeks back, I fell in love with the crow... So she got him printed on to a tote bag and again I am in awe of the print! 

I am also taking this moment to say that my poor poor printer/scanner did an absolutely amazing job... Anyone who knows me knows that I have a love hate relationship with my little printer... I expect way too much from it and tend to grumble about it a lot at any opportunity I get. It's gotten to the point where any time I need to use the machine I start to either rant at it or beg it with all I'm worth to work!

But I have forgiven it... for now. I love the design on the bag, it fits well to the shape and size and I love the softness the watercolours have.

As you can see in the second picture I've added the original artwork to give a size comparison. This is the reason I am back on good terms with my Pixma! 

Can you tell how excited I am by these designs/products?

So there we have a sorta quick update! 

If anyone is interested in buying from redbubble, my designs or otherwise, I can definitely recommend them on service and quality. They're fab!

And if you're an artist who wants to get there work available without the hassle of producing it yourself, again I can highly recommend them. 

Now! Back to my so called break!

More stars!

It seems I have become almost obsessed with the stars right now, spending hours looking at the constellation app on my phone, doodling as much as possible, studying galaxy images... I'm not sure what's gotten in to me!

But two more constellations have been added to the mix, this time Chamaeleon (the chameleon constellation) and Vulpecula (the fox constellation)

These were fun but I seemed to lose my technique halfway through and ended up having to lighten them up a lot before adding the stars and animals. Luckily these are done in watercolour, a quick wet brush and towel and paint is lifted with ease!

The thing that drove me insane whilst working on these two was not doing a red fox, painting him blue/purple felt ridiculously wrong! You can see the small splashes of orange where I was desperately wanting to add something :P

These guys will be scanned soon and may end up on my redbubble page :)

And on the mention of redbubble I've added Ursa Major and Corvus to my shop! I have to admit Corvus looks fab on so many products, my favourite has to be this cushion!!

If you're interested in my designs please use the link to my shop at the top of the page! :)

I also managed to complete my raptor designs! And was lucky enough to recieve a surprise voucher from redbubble so me and the OH have ordered our designs for free!!

I'm super excited for them to arrive!

It's always an amazing experience to see your work printed on to a product, whether it's a print or a tshirt. I love it, I love the buzz of joy that zooms through me :)

So the moment these tops arrive I will probably be bouncing off the walls!!

I will be posting more about my raptors before the end of the week including the designs and a bit of an explanation to why they are appearing and taking over my life.

I also have a rather huge project planned which needs to be started over the next few months to be available by the end of the year to early next year, this is currently all I can say on the matter, you know.... just to be annoying!

Now, the sun is out, the birds are singing, I've hit my limit of work for the day! Time to go relax and enjoy the world!

Have a wonderful day!

You didn't save!?

I love using Photoshop for my work, working in both traditional and digital media together has become one of my favourite styles to work in and adds an awesome variety to my working day, I can spend the morning sketching in a pad and the afternoon sat at my laptop, pen and tablet in hand.

That's always nice and freeing. It's always wonderful when you also have many projects on the go as you can just swap files and play around, mistakes are easily fixed with the press of ctrl + z (undo) and layers can be deleted if they're just that little bit too much.

But... and this is a big but... when your laptop decides to mess about and incorrectly save the piece you were working on, losing most of your hard work... you then want to ditch digital and go back to good old fashioned pen and paper!

I had been working on a raptor design for myself (and the OH, he jumped in too) and had put so many hours in... we're talking over 24 hours of work! So you can understand the sheer horror I experienced this morning as I started up Photoshop and tried to open the file that should have been saved as a .psd file... Instead I'm facing a .2 file that will do nothing.

I'm sure my laptop is sniggering to itself right now as I flap about in frustration knowing there's nothing I can actually do to get the file back.

Instead... It's time to start over.

Sure that sounds simple... except I'm currently staying with the OH and left my tablet at home... I'd have to do the painful mouse painting which is possible, after all I learnt to paint in photoshop with a mouse in the first place and am quite confident with the technique but it takes a lot longer to work on, at times doubling work time if not more.

So I need to decide what I'm going to do here, I must stop myself from glaring and growling at the laptop... it was having a fit when I was trying to save the file so I should've known really... not to mention I should have been saving a lot more frequently than I was!

There's a lesson to anybody who wants to get in to digital art! SAVE!! just repeatedly save until you're saving more than working! 

Well not that dramatic but you get what I mean.

Never underestimate the power of that save button. It's a very nice button. It keeps your sanity.

In more cheerful news I've been inspired by looking at bird paintings... Sounds strange but that's me. It's got me craving more traditional work (not brought on by the PS incident...) I haven't done an acrylic painting for quite some time.

The majority of my recent work is graphite on bristol board before being scanned and put in to Photoshop where it goes more digital. As I mentioned earlier this is something I enjoy but I do miss the mess and freedom you can have with good old traditional mediums.

The last real fun I had where I could just be free and do anything was the corvid speed paint challenge I gave myself last year (pictured above).

This challenge was done by giving myself 30 minutes and a very restricted paint palette. For most of these birds I have white and black with a small amount of blue apart from the chough which obviously had red and the jay which had an extra colour of brown.

It was lots of fun and I got messy which is always a good thing!

So seeing this new art work online and then going back over these guys has inspired me to give painting another go. I have colourful and wacky ideas filling my mind and I'm left with this strong urge to splat paint all over the place!

So lots of frustration mixed with fun plotting going on here! 

Really can't complain ;)

It's also my big fluffy dudes 6th Birthday today!!

He's changed in looks so much over the years but oh he's still the puppy he came home as... just a little less psychotic! 

My amazing boy who made me realise I'm a dog person and changed my life in so many ways. I got him for my 20th birthday (Not on a whim! took over a year of prep and thinking before we got him) and we're growing together... I'm 26 in exactly two weeks time! Oh golly gosh...

Time to get working!

Smile and be amazing :)