The steampunk... chicken?

This was from my Fantomorphia book, which has steampunk-style illustrations by Kerby Rosanes. It seems to be half chicken, half snake?

At the outset, I had told myself that, with the predominance of metallic machinery parts -- and I had already decided that the gears and bits and bobs would be a gold/brass color -- the chicken had to be in a color other than gold/brass to stand out.

So this was the result. It took me days to finish this intricate drawing, as I worked on making the metal look realistic.

Working with water color pencils

I have had a life-long fear of using the water-color medium, no thanks to my art teacher in my final year of secondary school, when I was preparing to take art at the GCE O Level examination.

We were doing all our painting (still lifes or portraiture or posters) in poster color paints then, and she used to say don't try water color unless you are a confident painter, because water color is really unforgiving, and that you'd sooner sop up and tear your paper trying to cover your mistakes... because you can't.

So poster color paints it was for the last two years in school. After that, no art, nothing. Then I picked up color pencils for fun. Along the way, the husband gifted me a set of Derwent Academy water color pencils. 

A Google search later, I found that you either color your picture using the pencils the regular way, then go over with a wet brush to turn it into a water color picture, OR you use a wet brush to lift the pigment off the pencil tips and paint your picture.

I signed up for online artist Susan Chiang's "Paint With Me" Challenge, under which you get an email from her every month, including a reference photo. Produce that in water color and tag her on Instagram. (@susanchiang_)

The picture you see here, a snowy scene in a pine forest, is about as far as I got. I used those Derwent pencils on Canson  "Mixed Media" paper, and used a wet brush to lift pigments off my pencils.  Maybe it's not gotten beyond what Susan calls "the ugly phase", but I was so discouraged that I stopped. (An aunt and cousin who saw it thinks it is promising and that I should go ahead and finish it.)

I need to have more free time to practise water color painting or just to finish this one up. I never sent it to Instagram.

Paisleys

Paisley - Everyone would have had a dress, shirt or bag in this classic tear-drop design. I did some digging online and found that this design originated in Persia (now Iran), but its name comes from the Scottish textile-producing town of ... yup, Paisley. 

I bought the book Peaceful Paisleys a while back, but had so far colored only one or two pages, and didn't complete either. It couldn't seem to hold my attention. 

Fast forward to this month, when the dratted Covid-19 virus had me working from home from Feb 7... Without the need to get dressed or commute to work, I suddenly had a bit more free time, so this book got dusted off. 

In the space of six weeks, I did four pages of paisleys (and some mandalas), the result of which you see here. Doing these was an exercise in choosing a color palette. I have a colleague who does this "by feels", so her paisleys' color palettes are pretty random, more freewheeling. I am more persnickety... or particular, though I don't necessarily think this is the better way. 

When coloring first took off among adults, much was said about it being an exercise in "mindfulness". I can see how my colleague and friend Adeline is being mindful, being present - by letting herself be carried on a feeling, not overthinking it when she picks one color over another. Then again, am I also not being mindful when I think very deliberately which six or seven colors might "go" well together?  

The first paisley is a medley in purple, my favorite color. I went for a mix of bluish/royal purple and reddish purples, and leavened it with grey as a neutral color, and some pops of blue and hot pink. 

The second palette has a more interesting back story to it.  I was reading a New York Times online interactive piece on Christian Louboutin, who told how he came to design a pair of boots featuring embroidered silk motifs. He had met some Bhutanese craftsmen, who showed him silk scarves in these colors. The resulting boot, which he has named Entre Ciel et Terre (Between Sky and Earth) has swirls of clouds and flowers. I drew my color palette from those boots.  

The third paisley... I'm rather unhappy with this. The greens are fine, and although I chose red for the alternate color because green and red are opposing colors on the color wheel, the result isn't that pleasing to me. Quite jarring, in fact. I tried to tone down the red by going over it with brown, but it didn't quite work. I'm thinking that the it would look more cohesive if the green paisleys bore some red in them as well. But I finished the green ones first and hadn't thought of using a second color then. 

Is planning ahead "mindfulness"? 

The fourth paisley was an exercise in using a pastel palette, over my seeming preference for stronger colors. Adeline had done a mandala in pastels, so I thought I'd go through the same exercise with paisleys to see how it turns out. 

Also, spring (and Easter) is around the corner, so you can call this my ode to spring, if you like. For this one, I had about half a dozen pastel shades from my Prismacolor set and didn't overthink choosing the colors. The idea of using a strong green (pea green, from my box of Derwent pencils) was an inspiration, and I think it kind of "wakes up" the page with punchy color. Green being the color of freshness, spring, rebirth, fresh starts... you get the picture. 

Mandalas

 

A chat with a colleague of mine who colors mandalas because she finds them wonderfully meditative made me haul out this book which I had bought off Amazon a while ago. Only a few pages have had abortive attempts at coloring these mystical circular designs, said to have originated in Buddhism, the circle symbolising the wheel of life... or something like that.

The book, The World's Best Mandala Coloring Book - wow, what a claim to make! - has 50 mandalas of varying levels of complexity. The downside is that the paper is a little thin. It definitely wouldn't stand up to water color if I chose to use my Derwent water color pencils.

As it happened, though, I used my regular pencils, my Prismacolors, on these. Like with the paisleys (see post here), I was quite deliberate in my choice of color for these. I would look into my box of pencils, see which color called out to me first, and then build a palette around that color, usually with a complementary color and a neutral in the mix. The pumpkin orange/ crimson lake colors feature in the first two.

With the third mandala, I went for a deep red (with pops of pea green), and with the fourth, it was a day I thought of the sea, hence the light, airy palette there.

The foo dog

This was a doublespread, so I took two pictures of it - better than one small one. The foo dog is often an architectural feature decorating the top of the posts at the main gates of (overwrought) Chinese homes. They are called "dogs" but are actually lions, and are often cast in bronze or stone.

This one here, drawn by Philippine illustrator Kerby Rosanes in his book Mythomorphia, is a male one, distinguished by a ball underfoot. If it were female, it would be a cub with her.

I chose this color for the body because this is a bronze one. A burnisher pencil was used to convey the smoothness of the surface.

The curly-cues around the head, tail and face of the lion: I couldn't really figure them out - whether they were clouds or part of the lion. I went with a bronze-y, pale yellow color for them, intending to make these part of the lion, as if it were evaporating, or morphing into cloud.

 With the palette so neutral thus far, I made the lanterns in red and blue pops of color on the page.

The steampunk cat

I'm happy with the way this turned out... a ginger cat (my love for red hair/fur, again!)  with "bionic eye", wearing a jaunty top hat in teal, accessorised with a brooch, a pocket chain watch, feather, skull and assorted small mechanised gadgets.

This one is still collecting a lot of "likes" on my Instagram and Pinterest feeds, where, for some reason, many iterations of this Rosanes drawing also feature ginger cats with blue-green top hats. 

I'm getting a lot of practice with coloring metal with this Fantomorphia book, another of Philippine illustrator Kerby Rosanes' works.

I was stumped for a while for the color to use in those mysterious pieces of tubing sticking out of the cat, so went with a purplish-grey, neutral enough not to attract too much attention. 

The steampunk peacock

The aim was to achieve the splendid blue-green iridescence typical of peacocks, but I don't think I quite got it here.

This drawing was from Kerby Rosanes' book Fantomorphia book, which a friend and I agree seems to have been churned out in a hurry to cash in on his successes with his earlier books, Animorphia, Imagimorphia and Mythomorphia. The drawings in this book - rather thinner than the other three - all have a steampunk theme, that is, with lots of metallic machine parts worked into animals and objects.

Hence this peacock. Part bird, part kavadi! Yes, it does look really like those heavy metallic, spiked structures carried by Hindu devotees at Thaipusam to show their penance for sins past, doesn't it?

I made the spikes piercing the bird gold and kept the rest of the palette for the "kavadi" in browns and maroons. The sharp definition between the yellow and brown of each gold spike is meant to convey high shine, rather than a matt finish.