Holiday doodles at Sorrento

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Caps for Sale judywatsonart lores

This little guy was in the Sorrento shopping strip last week. Waiting for his Dad, he was inspecting the hats on the hat stand on the pavement. I was sitting in the car waiting for my husband and boys to return and was able to sketch him. He didn’t stay there for more than half a minute, but luckily the hats did.

 

Strong faced woman judywatsonart lores

 

This Strong-faced Woman was seated overlooking the sea in the park at Sorrento. My kids were running around on the playground and I was sitting on a picnic table in the rain, drawing. It was boiling hot and kids were playing in the park in their bathers, dripping wet, shiny. This woman barely moved a muscle, even when the rain got so heavy that I had to stop because the page was getting very wet.

Leonard Doesn’t Dance and Trudy loves Dodds.

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I’m excited to have two new projects to work on over the summer. One is another picture book with Frances Watts called Leonard Doesn’t Dance. The other is the beginnings of my own picture book with the working title Trudy and Dodds.

I’ll be posting here about both of them as I go along. Leonard will be about birds… something I shouldn’t have too much trouble loving! I’ve posted a couple of very early ideas about Leonard already. And you can follow the images alone if you want on my Pinterest page here. The more wordy stuff will be on my blog. (…rambling, rambling…)

Leonard Doesn't Dance

Trudy and Dodds was a concept I had just come up with at the time I was offered Thunderstorm Dancing and to my surprise, I received a grant from the Australia Council to get the project started. But I found I could only focus on the one big (Thunder) project, and so Trudy and Dodds was put on hold. Now is the time to revisit it, and I’m really excited to be booked into a masterclass in mid February with editing maestros Jane Godwin (Penguin) and Erica Wagner (Allen & Unwin) along with book design maestro Sandra Nobes. I’ll be taking my dummy book and manuscript along to that masterclass as a part of my grant project to get some feedback and help.

So, in the meantime, on with birds and…. dog-monster-thingees. Probably.

Thunderstorm Dancing – nearly a book

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Thunderstorm Dancing cover lores

 

Here it is! the finished cover and what you will see in the shops from next April. Currently it is away being made into a book, with paper and ink and all that stuff we like.

As with childbirth… all the grunting and groaning is fading away, and soon I won’t remember that it was difficult at all :-)

 

 

Week 50 Christmas

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peace hope dove judywatsonart lores reindeer judywatsonart lores sleeping torch boy judywatsonart lores

Week 49: SUNSHINE

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Sunshine Troll judywatsonart loresTroll caught by the rising sun.

I could also have done a vampire being extinguished by the rising sun too… But this will do for my Quota of Gruesomeness for one week.

This is done with a Staedtler Lumocolour pencil on litho paper, because I couldn’t find any black Prismacolours long enough to use. It was oily and black and nice.

 

 

Catching up

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Hello! I’ve been a bit absent! Thunder is finished and off to the printers! I’m looking forward to seeing an advance copy in early January. It’s taken a few weeks to just get myself into drawing again. That’s not something I anticipated. And there are a lot of other things that I need to catch up with now that I’ve finished that mammoth project… including Christmas!

I had a great day with Ann James and Justine Alltimes last Monday, designing a poster for Jackie French, our Australian Children’s Laureate. Her project Share a Story will revolve around the ideas on the poster/calendar which will be available for free download by Christmas.

Ann James is a well known and skilled Australian children’s illustrator. Justine Alltimes is one of the hardworking and capable Laureate Project Managers. When the three of us get together, the ideas ping about like pinballs. After Ann had drawn and painted some images, I was able to alter them digitally to make new, and hopefully intriguing combinations, that will work well together on the poster and spark the storytelling imaginations of children, teachers and parents. The challenge was to avoid the literal interpretations of words like Slurp a Story and instead to come up with images that were open-ended or suggestive. We want starting points for stories, not stories in themselves.

More on Share a Story when the poster is released.

Other work in progress includes an illustration of Phar Lap for the front cover of a colouring book for the Melbourne Museum to match the dinosaur one I did a couple of years ago. As always with work done for Museum Victoria, I learn heaps along the way as I research the topic! Glad to find out that Phar Lap was probably not deliberately or even accidentally poisoned. Not that it made much difference to the poor horse, but he most likely died of colic related to a rare disease of the intestinal tract.

MMDinoColBk_FRONT.jpg

The 52 Week Illustration Challenge forges on towards the finish, but will return next year. I wasn’t feeling like drawing for this either, for a couple of weeks. So I’ve missed Week 47 New York, but I may go back to that. Although drawing New York itself holds little attraction for me, the New Yorker and its famous cartoons hold enormous appeal for me. So I think I need to do a New Yorker style cartoon. But of what?…

Tim and Tig New Yorker

A page from ‘Tim and Tig’

Above is an illustration I did for Aussie Nibble – Tim & Tig many years ago. I illustrated Tim and Tig just after receiving a copy of the Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker; a fantastic book that had a powerful influence on my drawing! Many of the illos in Tim and Tig, I’d wish to do again and much better, but this one I still like.

Now that I think of it, I did do some quick doodles for Week 46 Circus. (Oh dear. What a rambling post.)

The Twisted Princess tidies her tresses

The Twisted Princess tidies her tresses

This doodle was on the bottom of a Thunder illustration. You may see a wee peek of the washy water top right, and it ran completely off the page. It started as a doodle and then I got mesmerised by the leotard pattern. Actually, this led my mind off in the direction of a series of paintings I’d like to do…

This brings me to last week’s theme. Week 48 Fox. In a shocking twist of fate, I found that the topic had long ago been changed from Chicken to Fox! Horrors!

I did some fox doodles while I was waiting for the kids to get out of drama class and below you can see them.

Deadly Maggie

Deadly Maggie

This was a fennec sketch in an old book. I added some digital colour experimentally (even though fennecs are creamy in colour). It’s not entirely successful but there are elements of it that I like, including the scratching into top layers of colour; a Thunder habit that may continue for some time. Perhaps lead into interesting new areas.

fox cub judywatsonart lores

A very innocent young blob fox.

By contrast, this little blob fox is not deadly. This was my protest on behalf of my chickens.

Contortionist fox

Contortionist fox

I liked the tail hatching on this one, and also the two tone retro feel, but it was certainly rushed. Not what you’d call finished work.

The Fox with the No.6 Tattoo

The Fox with the No.6 Tattoo

Lastly, this fellow. The fox with the No. 6 Tattoo. I liked his eyes and expression. He seems to have a canny and sophisticated air about him. I added some very flat colour panels in Photoshop trying to keep it sympathetic to his stylised and simple form and I like the result.

 

 

 

Dancing Eucalyptus Sprite

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In a cruciform posture…

eucalyptus leaf sprite judywatsonart lores

Well I finished Thunderstorm Dancing today. Hooray!

But the marketing department want a completely different cover. Not hooray!

I didn’t feel like celebrating this evening. But I was determined to get a last minute picture into the 52 Week Illustration Challenge, which finishes each theme on a Tuesday with a new one starting the next day. I’d had the idea of leaf rubbings making a dress earlier in the week. But I wasn’t going to render it like this. This just came out of somewhere… But I’m really pleased with it.

It’s the colour palette from Thunderstorm Dancing. And it’s dancing. But the everything else is very different. It’s a nice change for me. I noticed the cruciform shape when I found I wanted to highlight the hands and feet.

 

Dogs from the past

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Looking at Liz King-Sangster‘s blog the other day, I so enjoyed her lovely paintings of her everyday surroundings. And it reminded me of a time when I used to paint with oils several evenings each week. That was long ago, when I was living in Brixton, London in a shared house, and working in the Aldwych Theatre box office.

During the evenings in the shared flat, comprising two floors above a lawyer’s office (and without a fire escape), wine flowed, cheese was consumed, friends chatted while I painted. Sometimes friends posed for my paintings. Many of those paintings ended up in the skip in the back yard of the rented property, before I caught a plane home to Australia. Some paintings came home by ship, and some went to the people who had posed for portraits.

That habit of painting continued after my return to Australia for a little while. Then work and circumstances called a halt. At the moment, while I am indulged enough by my family to have the largest bedroom of the house as my studio, (we sleep in the smallest bedroom) and there is space enough for computer equipment, drawing board and shelves, there is not room enough to paint at an easel, or even on the floor.

Looking at these two oil sketches of our dog Giddy the Hungarian Vizsla, painted not long after my return to Australia, I notice that it is nearly 20 years since I painted in oils! My goodness, I miss it, despite the fun I have with other media. I remember too, that these were painted after seeing some mid 1990s paintings of dogs done by David Hockney. No, don’t go and compare mine with his! Don’t!

Oh, damn.

You will.

Well, anyway, I loved it that he chose such a domestic subject as a dachshund and honoured it in oils. And I enjoyed capturing our beloved dog in oils in the same way that I had painted my friends in London. Note that the sleeping version is more ‘finished’ and see if you can work out why… Never work with children or animals they used to say in the theatre, but in my experience, they are some of the most rewarding to work with.

Red Giddy

Red Giddy

Blue Giddy

Blue Giddy

These two sketches are painted on wooden trays purloined from the science room of the old Banyule High School which was awaiting demolition at the time that I worked for Greening Australia in a renovated wing. The lip of the trays forms the frame of the paintings; a cheap alternative to proper framing. It’s time I took them to be framed properly. They remind me of the dog and the time.

And it’s also time I found a way to paint again.

Cartoon Cornish

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Comic Cornish Judy Watson Art lores

The Scribble Cornish of yesterday, became a fully drawn and painted Cartoon Cornish after dinner last night. I started out to do an inky depiction, with wet edges, to suggest the fuzz, as per all of my work this year really. Fast and loose… But strangely I found myself taking the unprecedented step of using a sharpened Prismacolour pencil to draw in some detail, as the Prismacolour Artstick was frustrating me by going off rather too wildly on its own tangents.

And although, this picture is not exactly as I would want it, I have to say, I quite enjoyed being careful… relatively careful… for a few moments :-)

Anyway, Mr Cornish salutes you.

 

Swirling and Swinging

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P24 Lachie judywatsonart lores

This afternoon I finished the second last illustration for Thunderstorm Dancing, which I should add is yet to be approved as the editor is not in the office today.

All being well, I’m now working on the last illustration for the book. I can hardly believe it. Wish me luck!

scribble cornish judywatsonart lores

This is not from Thunderstorm Dancing. This is a scribble-of-joy.

Okay… so this Scribble Cornish may exhibit some slight exaggerations of conformation… but the rest is true :-)