#902 – Autumn with Birch Trees

Hello and welcome! It’s my favorite thing to post now-a-days! Because if I get to post this, it means that I’ve been practicing, and that, hopefully, also means that I’ve been improving with my artwork! Its my drawing/painting series!

This time is a piece with autumn/fall scene and I tried incorporating some Birch trees. Why Birch trees? Because I thought they would be easiest! And I still think they are the easiest now too, after having tried to watercolor them. At least, better than me trying to watercolor any other tree! 😀

So, here’s the piece –

I started out with drawing the ground at an angle, and then drawing a few trees and branches here and there, with some criss-crossing branches and all. But the final piece that you see here isn’t exactly the same – I would say some 90% is retained. That’s good for now! 😀

Well, I did somehow manage to retain my original idea of the trees, but couldn’t do that with the ground. I had wanted to make it look like there were a lot of fallen leaves, but I had to turn it to grass once one of my strokes went wrong…I thought of adding a little grass on the left end, but I ended up covering the entire ground with it. I also had thought of making it look like the floor where the trees are standing on, but this one looks like a bit of a mound or something next to the trees. Ah, well.. its still not that bad! 😀

I don’t know what watercoloring I’ll do next – I’ve nothing planned as of yet. But I plan to make a small booklet of out things like this. That’s a lot of watercoloring I’m looking to make! 😀

That’s it for now. Thank you for stopping by! 🙂

#894 – Some more drawings…and coloring!

Hello and welcome! As you might know, I’ve started to dabble on drawing, and free hand water-coloring, along with my regular card making activities. I had posted some of what I had made in a previous post. This here is the next installment! 🙂

I have bought a A5 sized book for practicing by drawing and simple coloring – Brustro Artists’ Sketch Book. And all the art work featured in this post, are what I’ve drawn there. I find the book to be adequate for my practice as of now.

This one is inspired by Alex Siberia’s designs. She has got a ton of awesome digital images at her shop, and I found them really inspiring to draw. Of course, I am not commercializing mine, neither have I outright copied her art – this is my own style.

I drew the flowers using a pencil and used Uniball Fineliner pens to outline them – I do have pens of different thickness – 0.05, 0.1 and 0.3 – and I use them however I feel like. Once the outline was complete, I erased the pencil lines and colored the whole thing using Zig brush marker pens.

Of course, the paper is not think enough to handle the coloring. The color was showing through the page, but thankfully, the paper’s thickness was enough to not let anything bleed though to the next page. 🙂

And this one proves that the pages aren’t exactly meant for watercoloring!! 😀 I tried to get a look of illustration, but no..not meant to be!! I’ll attempt the next one over actual watercolor paper, and use this one for pens and my Zig markers… maybe pencils too, if I can manage it! 🙂

But I did looooveee those butterflies!! 😀

Some autumn/fall artwork, going along with the popular theme in the card-making world at this time! I tried drawing myself and some no-line coloring with the Zig brush markers. Loving the look of the marker’s colors on this one – a little more practice, and I think I’ll get a hang of it! 🙂

And back to only sketching! Its full of leaves this time. And I really wanted to try out drawing some Gingko leaves!! They are so pretty – I think if I use any color other then green for them, they would be mistaken for flower petals!! 😀

So, on this one, I tried to create texture by varying line thickness and density – but I don’t think I established it very well. But I did like the look of the leaves here! And all the dots accompanying it! 😀

I’ll join the Paint Party Friday: Week 31. What a wonderful platform to show off some artwork! Thank you Eva and Kristin for hosting it!

Well, that’s it for now! I’ll hopefully make the next set soon!

Thank you so much for stopping by! 🙂

Art Journal – Inspired

I am back with another page..:)

This time is a creation which I wanted to try for quite some time – in fact, since I saw Shari Carroll make a page for her art journal here. Now, though the page did inspire me a lot, I don’t own half the material she used there, and so I came up with my own version! 🙂

I had a sheet of paper, too thick for regular applications and too thin for card making – and for this page, I wanted something with the exact same thickness! What luck! 🙂 So, I outlined and fuzzy cut out the mounds, the trees and the branches and also random-sized squares and rectangles from this paper.

I then started adding various distress inks on these – there are too many I’ve used, so I am not listing them – the shades are pretty obvious though 😉 I then used a few stamps on them, mostly used other distress inks for stamping. The stamps I used are – Pinstripes from MFT, Chevron from Heidi Swapp, Stitched Circles and Victorian Tile from JustRite and Pattern Stripes from Hero Arts.

I then colored the branches using oil pastels. I then adhered all the pieces and added shading to the trees and the mounds using oil pastels again. I used a tiny scraper to scrape and blend the oil pastels, which also helped in better shading.

And that finished my page for my journal! Thanks for looking! 🙂

The Cat’s Shadow

Today, I tried experimenting with my brayer. I had seen a card recently, and I wanted to see whether I could reproduce the effects.

…I failed miserably! 😦 Unfortunately for me, the brayer I own is not exactly leveled – the ends are raised and when I roll it on any color, only the edges pick it up, and when I try applying it, its becomes a nightmare!! Well, something which doesn’t work the right way can make its own good effects, although completely unintended! This is how I came to today’s art –

The colors in the background were colored using orange and purple acrylic paints on my brayer. Although this background wouldn’t work well for what I had in mind, I changed tracks and made something which would suite the background instead! 😛 Why waste a masterpiece, right! 😉

I drew the cat using a pencil and colored it with black Copic marker. The tail came out a little thicker than what was in the reference picture…but, well, its ok. I am not aiming to sell my cat art! 😉

By the way, the cat I’ve drawn is picked up from this pin from Pinterest.

That’s it! Simple, barely took half an hour!

Thanks for stopping by!

Art Journal : Framed Flowers

Well, the flowers aren’t exactly framed, neither do they exactly form the frame..but I felt the name kinda suited what I had made….so there! 😛

I started with a sheet from an old book and tore off the edges. I then painted a thin layer of gesso on the journal paper and adding the page in the center, added some more gesso to the sides. I then heat dried this (mostly since I didn’t have the patience to air dry it!)

I then started drawing the flowers  and leaves from one corner. I then inked out the outlines using my Uniball Signo black gel pen. I also added little birds at the bottom, forming an imaginary frame. Well, if you ask me, this is the best pen to use on gesso – it doesn’t dry quickly – and so when I started painting, the ink spread a bit. Thankfully it isn’t so visible in the end! 🙂

Well, after this, I started painting with my watercolors. I wanted to color the flowers in shades of violet and red; I also added some pink and orange. I painted the birds below in the same colors, alternating the colors between the birds. After painting in the leaves, I also painted in the background in shades of green (inside) and blue (outside) towards the left and yellow (inside) and brown (outside), keeping the torn edges of the page as a frame outline. I also added some bright paint right outside the flowers, keeping it a little lighter and quickly blending it with the rest of the background – this added kind of a highlight to the flowers. 🙂

I then inked back the outlines, which had become almost invisible because of the paint. I also added a proper framed area beside the flowers and the birds by drawing a curvy branch-and-leaf combination. This I didn’t color in, and left it be.

I find myself having an urge to add some kind of a ‘wittwe birdie’ to whatever I make now-a-days! They look sooo cute!! 😀

And that’s my art for today! Hope you enjoyed! 🙂