Acrylics

It's been a very long time since I last painted with acrylics. This angry-ish looking cat is my tiny comeback piece.

I sketched it on a page of an old book, then cut it out and glued it (with acrylic gel medium that I used for the first time ever) onto a piece of a scrap cardboard and finished it with acrylics. You can see some of the letters coming through a little bit in places. It was fun. I'll be doing more of that soon.

Tangled Fish

This one started out as a doodle. There were numerous moments when I thought I should just abandon it, but I kept working on it and in the end I didn't think it deserved to end up in the trash.

Illustration Friday - Jump

Illustration Friday topic for this week is Jump. I was indecisive on what to do with the topic. Ballerina, parachute, athlete... When in a dilemma I usually end up with an animal and this challenge was no exception. So, here it is, my quick sketch of a dog in mid-jump:

Cats

Two new watercolor pencil cat portraits. I love how they turned out, but I didn't really enjoy making them. Making these requires a lot of time and concentration for me. Sometimes I am fine with it, but most times I am not, so I rarely do them.

After I finished the second one I noticed it looks fine when it's turned up side down. I think it might even look better the other way around. See:

What do you say? Which orientation is your favorite?

Cat Fest

I am still playing around with cats. These are the latest four:

Illustration Friday - Puzzled

Illustration Friday subject for this week is puzzled. Here's my take:

Watercolor pencil on heavy watercolor paper - 6x4".

Night Owl

I had one last piece of black paper and decided that an owl would be a suiting subject for it. The result is better than I expected.

I am still not in love with drawing on black paper with white gel pen, but at least now I see that I could get some results if I put thought and effort into it. Right now it's not something I am keen to do. Perhaps in the future.

Experimental Cat

While I was drawing cats I decided to try to do one on black card stock. It was an experiment to see what would come out if I tried to make a zantangle inspired drawing with white gel pen on the black surface.

The result:

I like the drawing, but I am not a fan of doing the white patterns on black surface. It's too limiting when it comes to shading and it's too dark. I definitely prefer black pen on white paper.

I don't think I'll be buying any more black paper, but I still had some left over, so I played with it and made this.

Somewhat fun to do, but it will still be the end of my white pen on black paper adventures, at least for a while.

Drawing Lab - Exercise 1

A few weeks ago I bought several drawing related books. One of them is Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists by Carla Sonheim. I didn't know anything about this book or it's author before I bought it. I just liked the art on the cover. At that time I didn't even register the additional text on the cover. It says: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun. Wouldn't you know it, that's just what I needed. I often struggle with that. I love to draw, but it often feels tough and a not fun. so, the promise to make drawing fun is very appealing to me.

The first exercise is to draw cats and so I drew cats. Lots and lots and lots of cats. I must have drawn at least 100 of them. The exercise definitely loosened my hand and gave me confidence, at least when it comes to drawing cats. The final result of the exercise is this 4x6 watercolor pencil drawing:

 I really enjoyed the first exercise and I am looking forward to exploring the book and the remaining 51 exercises.

Swamp - Part 2

After making the watercolor pencil drawing of an egret for the Illustration Friday I had an idea to do a similar, almost the same image but using a pen and patterns. Since the original image was quite simple the conversion turned out to be quite easy. 

It's a swamp all right, a swamp of patterns. Adding the shades really helped add order to this image. Before the shades it was hard to distinguish where one surface ended and another started. Shading made the surfaces pop out.

I can't decide which version I like better, the watercolor pencil or this one. Here they are side by side.

Which one do you like better?

Illustration Friday - Swamp

The topic of this weeks's Illustration Friday is Swap. I went with an obvious association - a swamp animal, Egret bird to be exact. It's a watercolor pencil on a 6x4 piece of watercolor paper.

Kitten

Today I took a break from tangling and did this cat drawing:

It's a mix of watercolor pencils and gouache on a 6x4 paper. Not my best work, but much better than I expected it would be considering it's been years since I last did this sort of drawing.