New pictures

I've been a bit occupied since starting my gardening business, not really felt I could concentrate on a drawing. However January slowed down quite significantly, I'm too poor to do anything else at the moment. Frank got jealous of the cat in the picture.

Frank on his magic rug

Trying to keep this blog fairly simple these days and my reproduction of these drawings in not that great. I'm only using Painter to crop and resize.  

Echinacea, inspired from photo in Gardening Australia.

Drawing Frank

I have to be quick, about 3 minutes and he kept biting me. Such a naughty boy.

Possum

I haven't drawn a lot of animals just a few of Amy and this little fellow from photographs. The eyes and wattle leaves need some work. A bit more practice needed to become more confident with these details, upscaling might work as well, this is on the last of my basic Derwent paper, A4.

Magnolia 'Vulcan'

I felt that it was ages since I did a drawing, the stamens are not quite right. I realise now I should only have about three or four values and need to decide where to use each before rushing in.

Some of my recent watercolours

This is my most recent, this is my first real attempt at wet on wet. I was really trying to come up with something bright and colourful. One of my favourites.

 

This was just an exercise but I like the blue background at the top of the painting.

 

My own idea, would love to be able to paint poppies. Needs some work. An finally my first real attempt, more pastel then watercolour.

Pears drawing

Another completed drawing. I found a conte' crayon and did some studies first, to get the shading right and work out a composition. Just graphite on a Derwent stetch pad, suprisingly it holds up quite well to reworking for cheap student grade paper. I like my little A5 Strathmore pad but it's a bit small.

Getting a bit more confident and it's easy to see that I've improved on my first drawing of Amy.

My first pastel

This just seemed to happen last Saturday. Found a great photo of some new varieties of echinacea.

Drawing Amy

When Amy died, I was so sad that I didn't know what to do. My thoughts were so muddled and I knew that I had to try and refocus. We both looked through the photos we had taken of her over the last 12 years. We had a huge collection from when she was only 18 months old, so little then to her plumb middle age.

I needed to think of  her in a different way, my partner is a web designer and created some drawings of her in Photoshop. I'd always wanted to drawn but on traditional paper and graphite. I did a few sketches of her from some of the photos we found. This is based on a picture I took of her in 2003, looking up at me from the kitchen floor. I would also like to try watercolours and pastels as well.