eller

...aaaand the third ATC made with the help of the craft materials sent to me by Up-Quark.



I still had a large clock sticker and two metallic pens I had not used yet at all, soooo, I had to use them on this card! The materials used are:

By the way, I'm sure the jeweler doesn't just make jewelry: he also has tools for much rougher work out, and the scales seem a bit big for small stones... All this sparkly stuff has to be a front. The question is what the lady REALLY wants in the store! Presumably, it's not purely for, uh, fashionable purposes... XD

Another page filled in the sketchbook from antaresnox. I'm trying to draw something fast every day. The forsythia is in front of the house... And, of course, rhododendron is everywhere.



It's kind of fascinating: rhododendron is an invasive plant, and when I was a kid, people started to plant it in their gardens deliberately "because the bugs don't eat it". This used to be true, except, oh wait, these days they do... I suppose we're seeing some evolution in progress. XD

So, a few weeks ago, I received a wonderful handmade sketchbook from antaresnox, and I just (finally) got around to testing it!



Isn't it lovely? It's tiny (7x7 cm, which is a bit under 3x3'') and has colored pages in pink, yellow, green, and blue. YAY! I love drawing on colored paper!

( More pictures, including the art supplies, behind the cut! )

Here are proper scans of my first two sketches, fuchsia (on a pink page) and aconitum (on a blue page). I used fineliners (Staedtler in 0.1 and Faber castell PITT in M), markers (Faber Castell PITT pen B in sky blue, pink madder lake, and light phthalo green), and a white gel pen (Pentel).





I already adore this little book! :D

Two more postcards for Postcrossing. Simple flowers, my comfort zone - I can produce these reasonably fast.





The daffodil actually does not involve any watercolor - that's transparent acrylics with lots of water. The magnolia is colored with watercolors, in the same style. The preliminary drawings and final highlights were done with acrylic pens.

This is another one for Postcrossing! I really like getting people who state on their profile that they like handmade postcards - that way I know the effort won't be wasted. (Some people collect only "professional" postcards, and that's fine. I just like to know, so I don't spend an hour on a card when the recipient would have been happier with something store-bought for 20 cents. I don't have the time to make cards for everyone, so I'm limiting that to those who explicitly state they like self-made things.) Anyway, this random person likes frogs and handmade cards, so I did the obvious thing and drew a frog for her.



The drawing is, unfortunately, on really crappy paper - I had once ordered a pack of 100 blank A6 postcards on Amazon, and while I received those 100 postcards, and they're not even flimsy or anything (350 g/sqm is a perfectly solid weight), they're kind of the worst of both worlds: extremely smooth (like, smoother than Bristol board) so working with pencils won't work, but buckling when they get wet. :/ The only medium that kind of works on them is acrylic pen. I also used fast washes of liquid acrylic color for the background of the leaf, but that was already kind of risky... I hate these cards, but I feel like I have to use them up somehow. Anyway, I'm getting faster with those small drawings, so, yay?

This is Mirainn, an alchemist in the world of Kolthainn. Yes, she wears lab equipment as jewelry - here with scale earrings and hourglass around her neck.

This is a shaker ATC with four windows!

- In the fireplace is glow-in-the-dark glitter in yellow as well as a scroll (cut out of paper) that Mirainn must have just decided to burn.

- On top of the fireplace, a bottle of suspicious liquid is being heated and vapors are billowing up! In it there is glow-in-the-dark glitter in green.

- The bottles on Mirainn's belt are filled with pink glow-in-the-dark glitter.

- And in the background, it's snowing over the mountains! (Transparent glow-in-the-dark glitter.) A second raven is there too - cut out of paper, even though it doesn't shake so well.

If you're interested in the process of making it..
( A full step-by-step can be found behind the cut. )

And here is the finished artwork!

Sooooo I have some new ATCs! These were for a forum game / swap thingy: someone sent me an assortment of interesting stickers, and I had to create artist trading cards using at least three of those on each.

Here's an overview of the stickers I received:



And this is what became of them:



Since I had a pretty old-fashioned castle and a campfire among my stickers, I wanted to create a scene with a touch of fantasy. The third sticker used to be a green patterned whale (WHY??? Who designs these stickers?!?), but I cut it up and made it the lady's skirt instead.
(Used stickers marked in orange on the overview sheet).



Here, I had several galaxy and star motifs as well as a lantern and a butterfly/moth (can't identify the species; don't care much)... It was immediately clear what I wanted to do with them! Okay, the galaxy washi tape has been mostly painted over, but, there are enough other stickers involved... It was fun to continue the sticker motifs as semlessly as possible!
(Used stickers marked in light blue on the overview sheet).



When in doubt, paint a mermaid! But I couldn't help it: the shiny gold fabric tape just lent itself to a scaly tail. And I could not NOT use the gemstone... I mean - PINK SPARKLE! XD
(Used stickers marked in pink on the overview sheet).



This one maybe requires an explanation: the Wolpertinger is a South German mythical animal. Bavarians encounter it all the time (at least after a few beers), but unfortunately, we don't have it in the north. XD And I had two purple owls, from different sticker sheets! I found that so weird (like: is there a huge market for purple owls?!?) that I had to make something with them right away. The large leaves in the HG were once a salad sticker... And the wings of the Wolpertinger are fluffy cotton stickers. :)
(Used stickers marked in light green on the overview sheet).

I don't have much time for drawing these days, but at least I have two new entries in my sketchbook, one from last Sunday and one from today! :)



Last Sunday, friends from work decided (relatively spontaneously) to take a trip to Hamburg, and, because I happen to live there, I met with them in the park. (Planten un Blomen, nicest source of interesting botany around here.) They also brought their art supplies! Well, they wanted to do some watercoloring, but that was rudely interrupted by a water show that got everyone (and, worse, everyone's paintings) wet. XD I was not actually productive, but the bench we sat on was surrounded by lovely yellow tulips, so at least I was able to fill a page with those.



Today's page is rhododendron with (not-very-friendly) guests! :) I was taking an afternoon walk with my boyfriend, and, as usual, he had to be very patient while I examined the local shrubbery. It's a year for maybugs: these huge beetles that appear every four years and eat everything green in sight. The one I drew here, on the bottom of the page, was able to finish the whole young rhododendron leaf while I was drawing. I was impressed! (Also, until today, I didn't know these things even eat rhododendron, which is not a native plant they'd be adapted to. They usually prefer beech mass destruction! But, apparently, they really just like anything and everything green...) The rhododendron was also being attacked by others, like the snail I also drew here. Poor rhododendron.

Help with identification? The incredible thing happened: unknown plants two days in a row. If anyone recognizes this thing, please SCREAM!

EDIT: This turned out to be Kerria japonica, thank you so much for the identification, mific!

I was pretty lazy today, art-wise, but while my boyfriend was standing in the kitchen, preparing dinner, I decided to take a little walk and take my sketchbook with me. Maybe I'd find something interesting? And, sure enough, someone in the neighborhood has a very pretty yellow flowering hedge. From afar, I thought, sure thing, that's going to be a Potentilla, how nice!, but when I came closer... Uh, what's that? The leaves are all wrong! (You can see how the leaves stood in the drawing below, I have reproduced one of the shoots of the hedge as accurately as was possible in the short time - about 40 minutes). But, we're still somewhere in the Rosaceae, aren't we?!?

Basically, I'm very confused. Actually, we are in the Rosaceae, so at least I was not totally off, botanically speaking?!?



On the art side of things, I'm quite happy with this page. This time, I didn't just take the same pens I used in my sketches from yesterday, but additionally used a grey marker (Faber Castell), and it's incredible, the difference a few shadows can make! Everything looks much more detailed, even when it isn't really. XD

...or: Textmarker Sketch From Hell. Posted mainly for yhlee's amusement.

This is one of my sketches for this mermaid ATC, and it has occurred to me that, yes, I posted a step-by-step of what I did on the finished piece, but nothing of the work that goes on the side, especially when it comes to planning that picture in the first place.



For this thingy to make any sense at all, you need to understand that, basically, there are two very different concepts of "sketch". One is simply a very fast drawing that is still somehow supposed to render an object. (I have posted such sketches for example here or here.) The other is... preparatory work for something that's happening on another piece of paper. And that's what we're looking at here.

Things you can observe from comparing this scribble excellent sketch to the actual mermaid painting:



- This artist clearly dislikes preparatory sketching and/or is pretty confident in her coloring skills. She's put the bare minimum of effort into a composition sketch that nevertheless contains most necessary compositorial information, and/or she belongs to the school of thought that too much detail in this kind of sketch distracts from and weakens the overall composition.
- Line dynamics. (Even with no detail at all, you'll notice that not much about mermaid or fish changed when you compare it to the finished picture.)
- Actually: some missing line dynamics. The stillness created by the curved-but-mostly-parallel water plants was clearly a later addition! (This artist likes to improvise. LOL)
- Areas of contrasting colors. (The fish in the finished mermaid painting are not just objects providing a "warm" color splash in front of a cool background - they're part of a whole wedge of warmer color.)
- Weird dark area in the upper right. (I also retained this in the finished painting: basically, I drew extra attention to the mermaid's face because I considered it important. Unfortunately, it wasn't going to be the lightest part of the picture - that was always going to be her tail - so I exaggerated the shadow in order to create a secondary focus point by value contrast there.)
- No shadow planning beyond the second-focal-point thing. From this, you can conclude that this artist is either hopelessly overconfident in her imagination of shadows or (more likely) did that in another sketch she already lost because it was also on a piece of crappy note paper that's already thrown out. XD
(- Corollary: this artist will be instantaneously kicked out of any serious art academy should she ever try to apply with this kind of sketch work. LOL)