Category: Drawing

 

 
I am hoping that tomorrow I can finish off any detail coloring on this one. Then I’ll spend the rest of the week fniishing off the red-haired mermaid I started at the beginning of the month (yes, I am STILL detailing her hair). When I get that done, I’ll clean up all the drawings from this month. I plan to offer at least four of them as prints. I have a Society 6 shop, but I also have a Zazzle shop. I’m thinking of closing the Society 6 shop and just moving everything over to the Zazzle shop. I don’t really have the time to manage multiple shops, and the greeting cards I sell do well on Zazle, so I think it would be best to consolidate there. I’ll be taking a look at both shops this week to see.

Anyway, tomorrow is the last day for this challenge, and then I move on to the “Krampus” challenge for December. Fun times ahead, people! Fun times indeed 🙂

So I finished inking the “Time” drawing and started adding colors today…

 

 
Princess looked at this one and cried, “INFINITE STARING CONTEST!!!”

And that’s pretty much all I got to say about this one tonight.

I decided to see if I could squeeze in one more drawing this month. 

 

I think this was kind of sort of inspired by the latest trailer for “Alice Through The Looking Glass,” but I wasn’t really consciously thinking of it when I started drawing. I was just thinking about what it would be like to have one really big giant eye. A really big giant clock for an eye.

I did the pencil sketch in Sketch Club on my iPad, then imported that into Concepts. I love Sketch Club for sketching quick pieces but also for more involved digital painting. I’m thinking that sometime in the next couple months I may do a painting challenge.

Meanwhile I’m looking ahead to next month’s challenge. I’ve decided that for December the challenge will be “Krampus.” I want to do a series of projects related to Krampus – drawings, Krampus cards, ornaments for my personal Krampus tree, and maybe a few Krampus related gifts. I’ll be crocheting, doing computer graphics, sewing, and who knows what else. We’ll find out next month!

So today I realized I had done as much as I coud with the Victorian Mermaiden drawing on my iPad…

 

 
I know I’ve done as much as I can because I hit the point where all I was doing today was playing around with the colors on the background frame. I honestly don’t feel like I need to add anything at this point, but I do want to clean it up  bit. There are some spots where the lines overlap a bit, and some spots where a line or bit of colored area needs to be nudged just a bit to one side or the other. And I want to play with the colors just a little bit more. Maybe make the background colors darker, or much lighter, or add a bit of gradient. Very little things, really.

So at the end of this evening, I exported the image as an SVG file and emailed it to myself. I haven’t opened that up yet, because I know once I do that, I’m going to want to spend hours on it, and hours on the Pirate Queen image as well. Since I don’t have to be anywhere or do anything over the Thanksgiving holidays, I’ll have plenty of time to play with both images then. But for right now, this image is as done as I can get it.

Hopefully tomorrow night I’ll have one image or the other cleaned up and can show you something final. But right now, I’m going to bed!

 

 
I had fun with this one today. I got the tentacles colored in and then I decided to add spots, similar to the ones on the images of octopi that I looked at for my color references. I used Concepts airbrush tool to make the blue spots first. The airbrush tool gives a fuzzy faded edge to the stroke, which I liked. I just dabbed on the spots here and there, changing the stroke size as I went to get some variety. Then I went back with the filled stroke tool again and drew in the dark pinkish spots over the blue ones. That pink is actually the hot orange I’ve been using, but with the opacity set to about 35%. Everything else in the drawing is so crisp with flat colors, I wanted the spots to be a little different.

After working on this mermaid for a while, I switched back to work on this one…

 

 
No, I still havent finished her hair yet, but I have spent a lot of time on it. Each one of those dark red swirls is drawn by hand, all of them carefully fitted together to give the hair what I hope is a sense of motion.  I expect it’s going to be another couple of days before I get this hair done, and then I have to think about what I’m going to do with the dress//tentacles! I really haven’t thought about that one. I do want it to have some decoration, but I’m not sure I’ll have the energy left to do anything with the dress/tentacles after finishing the hair. I’ll figure something out, though. This is coming along too nicely for me to not give that dress/tentacles some love and affection 🙂

 
Slowly but surely, inch by bloody inch, this piece is getting done. And that’s how it is with every piece of art – every drawing, every painting, every crochet project, every story, every novel… They all get done a little at a time until suddenly you’re done. And then you look around and go, “Now what?”

It’s the “Now what?” part that always gets me. I made a beautiful drawing. Now what do I do with it? Seriously, I need to do something with all this artwork, just like I need to do something with all the crochet I did last month, and all the polymer clay charms I did last summer. I know I could open an Etsy shop, or post stuff on Society 6 or Zazzle, but for some reason, I never get around to it. Maybe that should be January’s creative challenge. “Now what? Sell it!”

What do you think?

 

 
When I first started working on this drawing in Adobe Illustrator Draw, I went with a very different color scheme – muted pinks and greens. But I’ve been using those colors a lot lately, so I decided to change things up for the second go around.

For inspiration, I looked at images of octopi. A lot of the images I saw had a lot of oranges, hot blues, maroons and purples, and occasionally some bright golden yellows. I played with that for a while and came up with a color scheme I think will work – dark reddish browns, primrose yellows, bright aquas, and dark oranges. I think it works, but I’m still working out how I’ll use those colors throughout the entire drawing.

One thing that will help is Concepts color wheel. Concepts uses Copic colors. When you select a color, it will also show a list of different shades or tints of that color. In the image above, you can see the all the shades and tints for the dark reddish brown I chose. I’m using the lightest shade of thatfor the ruffled trim on the dress, and I used two other shades of that for the top hat. I’m doing the same with the other colors as well, and it seems to be working out.

So I’ll keep working at the colors on this one. I’m still working on the other mermaid, the one with all the long flowing red hair. That hair is just killing me, but I’m determined to get it done. And I’ve got the Pirate Queen set up as an SVG file, so I think the last week of this month, I’m going to take that drawing and any others I’ve finished and clean them up then post them someplace where people can get prints. I’m thinking maybe Society 6 for these, although I could also set them up as shirts on Threadless or cards and other items on Zazzle. I don’t really know yet. I’ll figure it out, and let you know.