Tag Archives: horse

The Kick-About #16 ‘The Woods Are Lovely, Dark And Deep’

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The prompt for Kick-About #16 is from a Robert Frost poem. You can read the entire the poem here. It’s a lovely one.

I’m pretty pushed for time at the moment, so I have been missing Kick-About challenges lately. And I’m late for this one. But I couldn’t resist doing a pretty literal interpretation of this one very hastily this morning!

I added some trolls playing chess on the lake. And who knows? Maybe Robert Frost was imagining the same thing. However, I’ve taken them out again for now. It needs more work balancing the composition than I have time for today. Another little job for January, perhaps. :-)

More work needed here. But Lots of fun for a lazy day.

Thanks again, Phil! A lovely interlude in a busy time.

Coming Full Circle

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We are tidying up the house before school starts tomorrow. An ambitious task, given a week or three, let alone one afternoon…

The boys went through a HUGE pile of their artwork in the kitchen and decided what to keep and what to recycle (I didn’t dare look). Aside from lots of kids’ artwork, they found some interesting other items including, a bag with a badge and pen from a toy train festival, two of my missing tax activity statements… for years already lodged (ahem), a pile of receipts for the same, and a few bits of my own mislaid drawings.

pencil testing pony

Mitsu-Bishi Hi-uni Poni with black wings

These were among them. They refer back to the first tests of the new pencil range that Scott bought in his Pencil Period, which I blogged about when I had just started Endpapers.

Here is another odd pair of sketches. I”m including them just because I have to finish cleaning the kitchen now :-)

pencil sketches kids with dogs

Miscellaneous! This was the beginning of my whippet phase, because of Thunderstorm Dancing. And Dexter the ball-obsessed Staffordshire Bull Terrier is of course the perfect foil to a whippet.

 

Holiday doodles

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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.

feather blob 1 judywatsonart lores

Blob Bird 1

feather blob 2 judywatsonart lores

Blob Bird 2 – what a cheery fellow

feather blob 4 judywatsonart lores

Blob Bird 3 – a foul mood. He was drawn at the bottom of the page, and no room for a decent pair of pins.

feather blob 5 judywatsonart lores

Blob Bird 4 – Also in a foul mood despite his fancy trousers.

red bird judywatsonart lores

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.

swan judywatsonart lores

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)

swan blob

One of the swans, from a blob. But he looks quite cheerful here, but I think he may have some goose blood in him.

page of dog blobs judywatonart lores

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)

felt tip swan feathers judywatsonart lores

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.

clydesdale judywatsonart lores

This is one of the bed sketches of a Clydesdale. Below is the Teen Pony.

Teen Pony feathers judywatsonart lores

Skunkyskunk 1

These are some little skunky fellows sketched for somebody’s skunk-loving child. I drew these while we were watching (or in my case semi-watching) Disney’s Frozen on DVD last night.

It seems as though Disney’s latest favourite animation trick is to make all the hoofed animals into pretend dogs, tapping into all the most recognisable and well-loved behavioural characteristics of man’s most popular pet. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. The characters are fantastic. The brilliant white horse in Tangled, was really a horse-shaped hound. (Completely hilarious.) In Frozen, the minor horse character is treated in a similar way, but also the reindeer Sven. Having said that, one of his most endearing moves is to cavort through the icy danglies in the forest in a stiff-legged, pouncy, playful way and getting his antlers all tangled up. I have seen playful cattle make this same move on many occasions so that may well be a uniquely ungulate urge :-)

Do people realise fully grown cattle can be playful?

Well that was a bit of a side-track… No wonder my skunky sketches ended up being stuck in the spiral binding. I clearly had my mind on other things….