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.

Still more progress

I am pretty much ready to transfer this design to nice paper. I don't plan to outline each leaf as I did in this design step, but will outline just the masses of leaves. They will also recede into cool starlit shadows, while the angel and animals will be warmly lit by the lamp flame. Woodland blossoms may also show up dimly behind the animals, but I'll figure that out in the tracing stage.

I realized while working on this drawing that it is influenced by Holman Hunt's Light of the World. 

Work in progress

I've been working on the composition of my next angel picture, which I plan to make twice--once as a coloring page and once as a finished watercolor and colored-pencil piece. There has been lots of erasing and relocating in the peaceable kingdom at the feet of the angel. I hope I'm done with that, but I may see more to do tomorrow. When I'll really see how to do it better will be when it's all done. But that's OK. Learning is good whenever it happens!

Sorry about the weird shiny pencil glare.