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!