bloowabbit

Copyright © 2016 by Roisin O'Hagan/bloowabbit
All rights reserved. The artworks/illustrations or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the artist except for specific permission granted with a free downloadable.

Friday, 12 August 2016

Night Sky Maidens

Was in my local Works outlet looking at their arts/craft section. This is where I'd bought the cheap acrylic paints which weren't that great pigment-wise. But if you're wanting to try out a type of paint it's a good place to start before investing much more money in quality materials.

I saw this little packet of wooden stars and thought they'd be useful for some sort of craft idea coming up to Christmas.

What I did with them was draw first with pencil and then tint with Letraset flex markers. Wood is easy enough to draw on with pencil but, as I expected, the markers colours bled quite quickly along the grain. With each new star I used the markers less heavily and that seemed to help prevent excessive bleeding.

The night sky background was done with an Ultramarine Faber-Castell Indian ink pen which bled far less and worked well on the wood. The edges and back of each wooden star was coloured dark blue with a Chafford alcohol marker.

These little stars are made of untreated wood and I feel that a wooden block designed and made specifically for painting would work a lot better. I'm not sure what I'll use these for. perhaps they're go into a curio box.

Links:

The Works website

Prismacolor on wood - Bryan Collins (fabulous work)

Turning random lines into a drawing - Kattvalk

All rights reserved. The artworks/illustrations or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the artist except for specific permission granted with a free downloadable.

Wednesday, 20 July 2016

Scribble into artwork

There's a drawing challenge I remember doing when I was little. Scribble onto a piece of paper and try to make it into a recognisable image. It's also a current popular challenge with artists on YouTube.

After rotating the page I decide upon the above version of the scribble. It suggested two heads close together each with a bobbed hairstyle.

The shapes of hair and arms became stylized and the figures very closely entwined. I decided flat colour was a suitable choice and coloured with a mix of ProMarkers, Copics and Chaffords.

Quality of drawing is loose and without preparation. Lines were drawn freehand so it has more of the style of my doodles than of finished pieces.

I liked using a scribble to begin working from as it felt a very free and uncluttered method - sometimes I can get bogged down with focusing on what approach or idea is best. This loose and quirky result may well become the basis for a future artwork.

Links:

Random nose scribble - Mary Doodles

Scribble turned into colourful abstract doodle - Pic Candle

Monday, 11 July 2016

Mother of Bats

I posted another in the series 'Mother of ...' on my facebook page Bloowabbit, entitled 'Mother of Bats'. I had an idea of something more gothic in mind and the result was this piece coloured in markers with added coloured pencil.

First colours laid down in the line drawing were Copic Ciao Milky White and Chafford PB71. Boston Board was used.

Bat images found online were used as a resource, including a flying fox.

The piece was coloured and shadows added.

Coloured pencils, Mars Chromo, give more depth to the marker layers. Spirals of purple, blue and green marker were used to break up the flatness of the background.

A final outline of black pen followed by a line of white gel pen helps the image to pop. More white gel pen was used to add spirals of white to give a feeling of mist.

I'm unhappy with the left eye, didn't notice it was too far to the right until I was about to apply the coloured pencil layer. I like the stance of the figure, her tattoo and her sombre expression.

Wednesday, 6 July 2016

Drawing using mirror reflection

I had been reading about people who can write/draw with both hands while each hand writing/drawing results in a mirror image of the other. And I reckon most people know about Leonardo da Vinci writing freehand in a mirrorscript. I began wondering what kind of an image I'd get if I drew using a mirror and only looking at the mirror whilst drawing.

It was easier to draw from the reflection without visual distraction if I held a piece of card over my right hand. Any mark I made on the paper was the opposite of how it looked in the mirror. Although I was looking at the reflected drawing the correct way up, in reality I was drawing it upside down.

Drawing a curved or straight line from upper left to lower right was the most difficult. It was easier to shade an area and then erase until a fine line remained.

The shape of the face appeared very distorted after inking, the mouth oversized and off centre. Trying to turn a very rough chin line into shading resulted in it looking almost like beard or sideburns. There was no movement to the hairlines, drawing them curved took a lot of concentration.

The image on the left is the actual drawing, created upside down, while the image on the right is what I saw in the mirror the correct way up. I used a mix of copic, flex, promarker and chafford markers, finding the flexible brush ends the easiest to manoeuver.

The challenge was more difficult, took much more concentration and the result was more inaccurate than I'd thought it would be. As I looked into the reflected image in the mirror I found I was attempting to draw a line but that my usual thought process combined with mirror resulted in a line going an entirely different way.

Want to try this again sometime to see if practice would improve my translation of thought to movement.