Tag Archives: improvisation

Continuous line drawings in French

The 52 Week Illustration Challenge theme this week is LINES. 

new hat judywatsonart colour loresThese 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.

the amusing dog judywatsonart lores

the boy she likes judywatsonart lores

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. calculus fashion5-colour judywatsonart lores copy

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 :-)

Last-day-of-the-holidays Doodles (experiments with blobs part 9)

Here are some final blob doodles to mark the end of the school holidays and back to work tomorrow (not to mention the piles of washing). I painted some more spiky blobs this time thinking that they might do well for some more birds, just for fun. The curvy spikes have served well in most cases as wings and beaks.

baby carnivore bird judywatsonart lores

The colours did not work very beautifully on this one. But here is a little Carnivore Bird Thing finding his legs… or his dinner.

baby carnivore thing judywatsonart lores

This is another Little Carnivore. I like his colours much better.

little duck thing judywatsonart lores

Little Duck Thing with Big Feet. (This blob is really very small.)

parent trouserbird judywatsonart lores

With all those babies, it’s only fitting to have a Mumsy kind of bird. This is a Mummy Trouserbird. She is waiting for her babies to catch up, but they are not very quick on their feet.

pyjama bird judywatsonart lores

This is a Daddy Pyjamabird. He’s getting up for a midnight snack. (note: At night a Trouserbird is called Pyjamabird.)

parachute trouserbird judywatsonart lores

This is a Trouserbird wearing a parachute.

preposterous thing judywatsonart lores

This is a Preposterous Thing. what can I say? He is lucky to be anything, considering that not long ago, he was merely a blob.

walrussy thing judywatsonart loresThis is a walrussy thing. He may be depressed due to the fact that his tusk is coming out of the wrong place and causes him discomfort.

 

 

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.

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

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.

scribble blob sample

 

poodle scribble blob judywatsonart lores

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 bird plays in the snow judywatsonart lores

Blue Booby Baby Blob Bird Playing in the Snow.

Ink, red crayon, felt tip, watercolour, white acrylic, digital layering.

Old dog in the snow judywatsonart lores

Old Dog in the Snow.

Also ink, red crayon, felt tip, watercolour, white acrylic, digital layering.

searchandrescue dog judywatsonart lores

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.

grumpy dog cloud lores judywatsonart

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.

JudyWatsonthunderclouds

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.

big and little cloud monsters lores

Monster cloud blobs…

wolf cloud blobs lores

Wolf cloud blobs, crossing raging rapids…

bird cloud blobs lores

Bird cloud blobs… one of whom just might possibly be a vulture cloud blob… (Should that be who or whom?)

bizarre cloud animalsAnd 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.

 

Mad Experiments with Blobs

Now I know how Dr Frankenstein felt… It’s all good fun until you create a monster.

This is surely the Weirdest Blob Ever.

Firstly, I don’t know what this blob is made of… While the kids were doing their homework (boo!) and I was cooking dinner (actually it was cooking itself) I found a piece of paper in the kids’ art and craft drawer with this mysterious stain on it. It had no odour, nor any bloody fingerprints, so I assumed it was safe to use without notifying the police.

weird thing stage 1 lores

The first thing I saw in it (although I was looking at it rotated 90 degrees anticlockwise) was the shoulder, face and tiny wings of a beast. He had strong haunches and was clearly crouching on top of something (invisible) and looking down.

weird thing stage 2 lores

I drew him in. But what was the fragmented blob beneath him? He was not crouching on it. It might be something fighting him for the whatever-it-was in between them. Then I saw the woman’s face with the veil over her head. The woman was confronting the beast. So I drew her in. I decided she was some kind of Earth Mother figure and they were fighting for control over the Earth. So I drew the Earth in… and some decidedly weird explosions….

By this time the dinner was no longer cooking itself and needed some help, and the kids were asking questions and giggling and pushing each other at the homework bench. (That’s my lame excuse for the state of the Earth Mother’s hands… or claws.)

So I beat them all soundly and sent them to bed.

No, I mean I fed them, played Trivial Pursuit with them and sent them to the shower. (I lost at Trivial Pursuit of course.)

‘Now I’ll fix this weird blob with a bit of discreet colour’, thought I. ‘The colour will work its magic…’

weirdest blob ever lores

I have no scan of the first coloured phase. Sorry ’bout that. But you’ll have to take my word for it that the colour made the blob look even weirder. Especially since the space fight was going on (at that stage) in a completely white environment.

I’m not sure why they are fighting as the Creature looks quite amiable and isn’t even raising a paw against the Earth Mother. Maybe He is trying to protect the earth and She is the one who wants to destroy it with storms, hurricanes, asteroids and plague. I would ask them if I could, but they wouldn’t hear me.

Then I added watercolour to create dark space around them but it wasn’t dark enough and the contrast became so low that the effect was one of a brownish blob surrounded by a larger greyish blob. I added some Prismacolour black pencil as a quick experiment in increasing the contrast. It succeeded to a small degree. Too small a degree.

I scanned the whole blobby mess.

In an act of insanity (given the amount of work I have to do right now!) I added a further layer of tone (purple) in PhotoShop which more or less addressed the contrast problem, and added some stars and magic sparkles. (How low can you get?)

Finally, as if to confirm that I have lost my grasp with reality, I wrote this post about the history and evolution of a nondescript and very weird blob.

However, now that it has been so thoroughly described, it can no longer be deemed nondescript… at least in the 17th Century sense of that word which is to say ‘not previously described or identified scientifically’.

I feel there are still some holes in the scientific nature of this blob though, so perhaps a thesis?

The Feast

or

The Fast

or

The Curse of the Black Tongue

This evening was the Drama Class night, when I take my two plus one more to a drama lesson at a big leisure centre. We always enjoy the evening despite the slightly rushy nature of eating early straight after school and then getting to the class on time, when nobody can find their shoes, or their book for the car or remember to go to the toilet until we are about to drive away… the usual stuff. They are a happy bunch of three and I enjoy their nutty company. I also enjoy the slightly-less-than-one-hour of free time at the centre when I can draw just for fun.

This week’s 52 Week Illustration Challenge theme is ‘feast’. It’s not a theme that lends itself to time poor folk because it conjures up mental images of banqueting tables, rife with imaginative and mouth watering detail. Forget that.

Having grabbed the nearest half-stocked ‘art backpack’ as I went out the door with the mad ones, I found that I had limited supplies with me. (You were wondering what that subtitle The Fast was all about, weren’t you?) I had a vintage book to draw in and a box with pencils, fine point felt tips losing their inkiness, a brush tip black pen (also fading), one deep terracotta red crayon and a small paintbrush but no water receptacle.

Thinking I’d hopefully find a pithy quote to illustrate in the vintage book – something that brimmed with feastiness, or failing that, feistiness –  I found it was all about a family during the Gold Rush and that Hugo had used the first half to practice scribbling with thick black texta.

Image

Not to be deterred, I found a page with a description of an extravagant breakfast. I set to work illustrating it using a pencil and the first subject that came to mind: a chicken serving breakfast. Unfortunately the chicken was so long and elegant of neck that she obscured the text she was illustrating, so I swiftly moved on.

I found the page above and quickly drew Mrs Pym in her kitchen with the fading brush tip. She’s okay. But remembering that the brush tip is water soluble I found I hankered to deepen the tone with a bit of water. No water. Aha! Yes! You guessed it. The Curse of the Black Tongue!

I confess I glanced around me to see that nobody was deeply offended, as I proceeded to use the nearest clear liquid to hand… or mouth.

I had half a drama class still to use… what could I find? After a few minutes of fruitless searching, I gave up on wasting time looking for food references in the vintage book. I thought I’d draw a pelican with a border of fish leaping around him on the page. And so I did. But the fine point markers kept running out on me as I drew, so I kept changing, keeping to a .5 or below.

FEAST pelican lores

 

Although a real pelican  would be more likely to feature blue legs I think, the red crayon came in handy here. And once complete, I was just left thinking how much I’d like one more colour to highlight the fish with. If only!

Oh happy pelican! As I resorted to the Black Tongue again in a not-very-hopeful kind of way, thinking that this time, the ink was waterproof, I found to my delight that all but the bird’s body and one wing were drawn in fine point markers that were water soluble and which when wet became green!

I am quite pleased with my pelican page. But I can still taste that ink on my tongue.

 

 

 

 

 

Bird Blobs

blob birds lores

Lunch break bird blobs.

Felt tip, watercolour pecking and white acrylic flecking.

Mood Blobs (experiments with blobs – part 5)

I could’t help noticing that these blobs painted late last night when feeling tired and a little low, all have one thing in common.

Despite the fact that they all were generated from random colour blobs, they all look downward to the bottom right of the page.

contemplative cassowary

contemplative cassowary

Scott pointed out that this fellow looks Muppetish. A compliment :-)

pondering purple  person

pondering purple person

preoccupied parrot

preoccupied parrot

Ptentative Pterododal

Ptentative Pterododal

No wonder this Ptreposterous Pterododal is Ptentative… His wings are ridiculously inadequate for his size. I’d stay on the ground, if I were he.