More of my doodles (not all poodles) for the 52 Week Illustration Challenge here.
I am not a toy!
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Tag Archives: dog
Revenge in 4 stages
Dog performs psychological punishment.
Cat demonstrates turning the other cheek.
The 52 Week Illustration Challenge theme this week is TOY.
Happy Wednesday.
Week 32: PSYCHEDELIC
Cat trouble again
I don’t know if the cat is directly responsible for this little dog’s trippy bad dream, but she is certainly doing her best to mozz him.
Continuous line drawings in French
The 52 Week Illustration Challenge theme this week is LINES.
These are some line drawings done in the car during a rainy soccer training session in half darkness. I am quite pleased with them because they were done from the imagination and without any visual reference. I let the words of the french lesson lead the direction of the doodle. I tried to do them almost completely using a continuous line, except where my pen fell off the page. And above, I did some rather crude scribble in the speech balloon as well.
And below is one of my Calculus Fashion ladies with a bit of colour added. I am quite liking the effect on the parchment and print. 
Sometimes I draw quite complex continuous line drawings in my mind, while lying in bed at night. It’s very relaxing, and the resulting drawings take up very little storage space.
Occasionally I forget where I put them, because I fall asleep :-)
Busy
I need another cup of tea.
My bottom is becoming chair shaped.
Puppet Challenge… Weaselly Wolves and other unfinished creations
Weaselly Wolves – painted in 2013 for ‘One Word One Day’
Finding myself trying to make Greyfur too anatomically kangarooish was making my puppeting challenge hard. Indeed, my son asked me if the incomplete Greyfur face was a dog or a deer.
Other subjects I’d earlier considered making for the Puppet Challenge had included the following. All have been covered by other puppet challengers as it turns out.
The Big Bad Wolf
The Big Bad Wolf is a favourite topic of mine, as I’ve been a fan of Angela Carter’s writing for many years, but he’s not a local myth like Greyfur. I also find wolves pretty easy to draw because along with their doggishness is the fact that the BBW is now such an icon, that he is recognisable in any kind of shorthand format and is way above any kind of need for anatomical realism.
Wolfish types (above), bearing little resemblance to Canis Lupus.
Puss in Boots
Puss is also not a local tradition. Angela Carter does a fabulous rendition of this fairy tale too. And as I seem to be obsessed with Cornish Rex cats at the moment, my Puss in Boots sketches were distinctly Cornish in flavour; black, big-eyed, big-eared, narrow-framed.
This one was for the 52-week Illustration challenge, but I was thinking about Puss in Boots for the puppet challenge at the time.
first sketch, always too naturalistic, but he almost captures the devil-may-care nonchalant cat personality I was going for.
shadow puppet perhaps? I liked the idea of the sail-like ears being semi-transparent and the rest being solid black card.
a further attempt to get whole figure on the page!
marionette? With Yarn body and wooden boots?
black yarn knitted or crocheted body?
Back to the shadow puppet idea. I drew the shadow puppet ogre and the mouse that he turns into, foolish fellow. I also drew the king and had a couple of goes at the lad.
Troll with Billy Goats Gruff
We live by a creek with a bridge so this had some local relevance. And this was the first one that I considered using the crumpled paper for. I had it in my mind that the curling horns of the goats would look great if made out of crumpled and twisted paper. And I was intrigued about the challenge of making three goat characters and capturing the varying ages and personalities of the three (a theme I had a lot of fun with in The Middle Sheep by Frances Watts.)
Three goat siblings I drew for ‘The Middle Sheep’ by Frances Watts
I seem to have misplaced my puppet goat sketches. They’ll turn up somewhere unlikely one day…
Greyfur the Kangaroo
A couple more sketches I found while I was looking for the goats!
So anyway… I went back to the wolves in the picture at the top of this post! These two rather weaselly looking wolves are plotting mischief together. Below are some photos of the fun and messy creative process the other night on my kitchen floor. The boys were having a fantastic time for much of the evening, playing with a sack full of puppets that I had tipped out onto the floor. Puppets really do inspire all sorts of creative play.
Two (Big, Bad) Wolf Brothers
starting point
eyeballs
one weaselly nose and some fingers with claws drying in front of the fan heater
three toes before strapping together to make a hand. I was careful this time to make the outside and inside fingers the right length.
strapping together to make a hand
adding a thumb
two hands, one with a wrist
two hands with wrists
positioning some eyeballs!
adding eyelids (with rough dots for pupils)
time for some teeth after the lower jaw added
I wanted the teeth to be very crooked and uneven
both with eyes and with ears under way
All ears connected. The Brains (left) has narrower eyes to make him look more sly. Brawn will have the lolling tongue.
Indian ink on crumpled paper. A very satisfying process
Black paint on. I may add more later.
This guy is just asking for a tongue now.
tongue ready to attach. Teeth and eyes with some white added. Brains will have moving hands. Brawn will have a moving mouth. (This is probably rather counter-intuitive but there ya go!)
with tongue, painted mouth, bloodshot eyes and Granny’s bonnet.
Would you buy a used car from these two?
This is where I had to stop. If I have time Brawn (Actually, I think his name is Willy) will get a nightdress slightly stained with blood on the front, and lacy sleeves from which will protrude his long, black claws over the bed clothes.
Brains (Hmmm… Ernest, perhaps, because he’s anything but earnest) will have working arms, but I’m not really happy with the high attachment I’ve started here. I think he’d be more impressive without such a distorted scale. I might give him long arms and move them with rods instead so that they can creep in from the side in a lurking sort of way. I think these two should look rather long and rangy like their original drawing, rather than dwarfed versions of themselves.
I’d love to add whiskers, but not sure where to get those twirly feathers from that people use on puppets. I could modify some of my chickens’ feathers I guess… But I’ll have to leave these rascals for now.
Holiday doodles
Here are some little watercolour blobs done while on holiday in Portland. Our holiday was short but very sweet…unlike Blob Bird No 3 who is short and short-tempered. These blobs are all just a few centimetres across. I forgot to take a fine brush with me, so I couldn’t get any fine feathering to work. I did birds first, as the 52 Week Illustration theme of the week is ‘feather’ and then I played around with dogs, monsters etc.
After we got home, late yesterday I did some more drawing in bed. I remembered that the shaggy hair on the lower legs of some breeds of horse (like the Clydesdale) are called ‘feather’ so I drew some Clydesdales, and then found myself drawing a Rebellious Teen Pony With Attitude, who also has feathered legs. I rather liked her.
Blob Bird 1
Blob Bird 2 – what a cheery fellow
Blob Bird 3 – a foul mood. He was drawn at the bottom of the page, and no room for a decent pair of pins.
Blob Bird 4 – Also in a foul mood despite his fancy trousers.
Blob Bird 5 – a bit mad I suspect.
We met a pair of swans in a park with a pond and little hire boats with outboard motors that the kids were able to steer. The swans were crazily gorgeous in a bizarre way, and very grumpy. I was watching them for a while and then drew them from memory later. We also saw Mortimer the Raven at the park, with his friend Edgar. I fed Mortimer from my hand and I saw up close that he really does have a hairy beak! Joan Aiken did not lie.
This is one of the cross swans, drawn from a blob. (Also cramped at the bottom of the page with his toes falling off the edge. I’ve added a bit of digital depth of tone to this one. He was pale grey)
One of the swans, from a blob. But he looks quite cheerful here, but I think he may have some goose blood in him.
A page of dog blobs. These worked better than the birds I thought as I had warmed up. (Maybe it was the champagne, or maybe it was the log fire…. hmmm)
Here are the Cross Swans again. These were drawn in bed last night after we came home. I’ve scanned them and coloured them digitally.
This is one of the bed sketches of a Clydesdale. Below is the Teen Pony.
Scribble Blobs (experiments with blobs part 7)
Just so that you know what those mysterious scribble blobs look like… here are a few.
One of them is caught in mid-mutation; turning into a poodle.
Not sure what I’ll do with that blob at the bottom of the page… Man! That’s what I call a tricky-messy-multi-scribble-blob.
Here’s Miss Poodle. She likes red.
She’s a digital sketch working from the scan at top. I like the effect of watercolour, but sometimes a quick doodle poodle is a good doodle poodle.
Week 27: Snow (experiments with blobs part 6)
These first two are grey blobs with red crayons scribbles in the middle of them. I have found they are harder to turn into things. The red crayon scribble is quite distracting! Who would have thought?
Blue Booby Baby Blob Bird Playing in the Snow.
Ink, red crayon, felt tip, watercolour, white acrylic, digital layering.
Old Dog in the Snow.
Also ink, red crayon, felt tip, watercolour, white acrylic, digital layering.
Search and Rescue Dog in the Snow.
This one has no digital layering. Thought I’d see what the white acrylic paint could do with the snow all by itself. I also skipped the red crayon scribble. Instead, this time I did a grey ink background wash with a red watercolour blob in the middle The red watercolour blob was what suggested the shape of the dog character and the rest followed from there.
I didn’t think I’d come up with anything for the ‘snow’ theme actually. It isn’t something I have much experience with. But blobs are a good way to start when you don’t know where to start. Then, just add some warm winter woollies and snow.
Cloudy Days in Melbourne
Winter has finally arrived in Melbourne. And the 52 Week Illustration Challenge theme is clouds.
I didn’t have to do anything extra for the Challenge this week really. I am working with clouds all the time for Thunderstorm Dancing, and although I can’t post an entire image until the book is published, I did post a fragment of the spread I was working on, which features approaching storm clouds (below). Froth, spatter, roar and hum.
This spread was finished until my Beloved told me that the veranda perspective needed alteration… the same veranda that the Cat Called Thunder is trotting across. So I will finish it (again) today.
I’m not saying I relate to that cranky terrier up the top. Not at all. Nope. And I do appreciate the help with perspective.
I did find myself wandering off to do cloud blob doodles to cheer myself up though.
Monster cloud blobs…
Wolf cloud blobs, crossing raging rapids…
Bird cloud blobs… one of whom just might possibly be a vulture cloud blob… (Should that be who or whom?)
And lastly this rather bizarre Cloud Blob Doodle which in fact I had done a week or two ago as a variation on the blob improvisation idea. Wherever that photo was taken, it wasn’t Melbourne this week.
Judy Watson 