Illustration Friday: Mind

 She carries the regenerative light of God, transforming the predatory and fearful natures of the creatures until they live at peace with each other, "one in heart and mind." (This phrase originally described the very early followers of Jesus, who freely shared their possessions with those in need.)

This is the first picture up to sell as prints on my Society Six shop. Click here to take a look. I'll be putting more pictures in as I make high-definition scans of them.

I would like to apologize to my email subscribers who received two blog posts with this art in their inboxes. I attempted to blog this picture yesterday, and accidentally published it before I was done. I fixed up the post a bit, then tried to share it with Illustration Friday, but IF wouldn't let me on for some reason, so I just gave up and deleted the post to redo today.

Illustration Friday: Snail

I made this with acrylic paint accented with colored pencil. It scanned much better than my mostly colored pencil drawings, though it's still not quite what I would like to see. It was also much (crazy much) quicker to make, which was a great relief. I feel that my desire to illustrate an entire story has just become achievable. If I weren't so sleepy right now I would be giddy about that.

Sketch book update

I thought I'd share some bits from my sketchbook.  I've been trying to get a better handle on how the planes of the face and all the features fit together, so I've been doing lots of faces. Here are two I copied from great painters.

A couple days ago I realized I could be taking pictures of my kids and using those for practice. This picture of my nine-year-old Daniel is a decent likeness. It's much easier to get a likeness with a profile, I find.  I drew it on gray paper and added some white highlights with colored pencil.

Here are some doodly drawings from my head. This sad fairy in her tiny cottage is for a story I've been working on intermittently for awhile.

An idea for a lacy looking fairy wing.

Cuteness just because.

And last of all, I've been messing around with acrylic paints trying to come up with a way of painting that is less time consuming and easier to reproduce than colored pencil. Perhaps this next image could be called a study for my next angel picture. It's incomplete and in some parts just wrong, but there is an energy about it that I really like, and that I'm afraid I won't be able to capture in the real thing. But here's to trying!

A bit of this and that

I haven't been here for awhile although I've been busy drawing and sketching a lot. I've also been reworking my angel with animals and trying to get it into a digital form I feel OK about putting on my Society Six shop, which makes prints on demand.  I've taken it twice to be scanned at an office store because it's too big for our home scanner, but the scanning process just doesn't work that well with colored pencil, and it takes more skill than I have in Photoshop to fix what is going wrong. Next week I'm going to talk to a someone in a print shop and see if they can help me. I am working on perseverance in the face of discouragement. Any glitches in practical, production steps get me down to a ridiculous extent.

Here are a couple snap shots--they are a bit washed out but still show some of the greater detail and depth I've tried to put into this piece.

Here are a couple sketches from great paintings and photos. I've been making such drawings daily, but I haven't been posting them because knowing I'll post them distracts me from learning and makes me stress out about making something I feel is good enough to show.  

A couple of doodles that might turn into something else someday.

And lastly, a cheery drawing from my little girl.  

Coloring page--angel with a violin

Seasonal illness in my family and me has slowed me down lately, and getting my next angel coloring page done took a lot longer than I expected. Even now, I'm not happy with how the scanning and Photoshop worked out (it should have been so simple), and I don't like the trees, but I need to move on. I was pleased, though. when this week's Illustration Friday prompt "up" seemed fitting.

I still haven't gotten my last drawing of the angel with the animals properly scanned and cleaned up. That's at the top of my list. Next is designing a wedding invitation for dear friends. After that I will turn my angel with the violin into a watercolor and colored pencil picture.

"Don't be afraid"

The next step is to take this to be scanned at an office store, and clean up smudges in Photoshop and correct color as necessary. I feel colored pencil reproductions look a bit faded until the volume is turned up a bit in Photoshop. It's too big for our scanner, and my husband took the picture with the scan app on his phone. Maybe I should have waited to post until I had a perfectlyfinished image, but to tell the truth, I'm feeling a bit impatient to share. I've been working hard and long on this and I wanted the feeling of checking something off my list.

My title for this watercolor and colored pencil drawing is "Don't be afraid." I don't have words right now to talk about the significance of the title--my mind is fuller of images than words just now. 

When  this image is spruced up a bit, I want to  put it on my Society Six store which has never been anything but empty.  

Illustration Friday: Swirl

I am reposting one of my angel-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin drawings for this week's Illustration Friday. I drew it almost exactly a year ago.

I have been putting many an hour into the colored version of my angel with a lamp and animals. I hoped to be able to share it last week, but I'm still finishing it up. It will surely be done in a day or two. Here's a work in progress picture, though there has been so much done to it since I took this photo that it seems like ancient history.

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Illustration Friday: Sound

A few years ago on a warm, bright spring day I was working at my carving desk. A door to the outside was open wide to let in the sun and the fresh green smells, and I heard a bird cheeping.  The sound of it was so sweet and high-pitched that I was startled, and I stepped outside to see what kind of bird it was. In a little tree just budding out I saw a light olive-green bird that seemed too small to be real.  My surprise at its being so small lasted for a good long gaze before it flitted away. Its legs were thin like fine inked lines.

I learned from a bird book that it was a female ruby crowned kinglet.

I did this drawing with my brand new crow quill dip pen and india ink. Its really fun to use--I love how flexible and expressive the lines can be. Today I figured out that drawing out a line slowly gives me much more control than scraping out a line quickly and nervously

Angel with animals coloring page

Here's the coloring page. The angel ended up looking a bit like my seven year old daughter, which I didn't mean to do, but I'm happy about it.

I'll be moving on to watercolor and colored pencil next. The coloring page looks stiff and like stained glass, which I'm OK with, but I'm hoping to get the painting a bit looser and livelier. 

I went ahead and posted it on Illustration Friday where the prompt for this week is "talk." I admit this is a stretch, but perhaps a small one. Communication is occurring, though not actual talk.

On another note, I haven't been doing my sketching of great art because my kids gave me a most thoughtful gift, a month of classes from the Society of Visual Storytelling. So until that runs out, I'll my learning time will be spent there.