A dragon

This was off another page from Your Personal Wish Book by Asian geomancer Lillian Too, with illustrations by Jennifer Too.

Lillian's "commandment" on the page facing this drawing was to color the dragon, a Chinese symbol of strength and vitality, "in a color that resonates with you", and to render its "magical" scales with a glitter pen.

My tin of Derwent pencils, a set of 72, were out, so I used those instead of Prismacolors.

I went with purple, my favourite color, for the dragon, and layered it with green nearer the areas where the scales catch the light. Instead of glitter, I used my white gel pen to bring out the high whites in the bright areas.

For the head, I opted for strong reds, oranges and yellows. I picked a strong pea green for the spines through the creature's length.

As for the pearl: That caused some difficulty, and I'm not pleased with the result. I looked up some tutorials online, and they seemed to advise using contrasting shades of white and deep grey, and to layer the white in pink and mint green to bring out the luminescence. As you can see, it didn't quite work. I think the white I used wasn't white enough.

A rethink on the clouds: I should have done them in white, with some bluish shading, instead of using two pale shades of blue.

As for the rim of Chinoiserie patterns around the dragon, I did it quickly. The fine lines were quite a pain and a test of my patience. I only reminded myself to keep the colors muted so that the dragon, the main event, would pop.

The option for the rim pattern would have been to keep it monotone, probably in blue, in a nod to Ming blue-and-white pottery.

I put this on Instagram, and R says she thought it was a photograph of a porcelain plate. I guess this piece turned out ok overall.

But the pearl, the pearl, aaarrrggghhh!

Fish!

Nine fish from Your Personal Wish Book by Lilian and Jennifer Too.  

After some freehand-drawn works, I returned to my coloring books this last weekend, this time picking up a lesser-used book, Your Personal Wish Book by the Asian geomancer Lillian Too. The illustrations are by Jennifer Too, probably a relative.

The challenge tossed by the two Toos (haha) was to render the nine fish (carp?) on the page in vibrant reds. The Chinese say that the word for fish, yu, sounds like the word for excess, yu. The number nine is no accident either. It is a symbol of longevity. 

I used my box of 72 Derwents for this one. It had several shades of reds, from the deep cranberry to pale orange. I picked a combo of three to four colors for each fish - a red, a paler red and a neutral (grey or sand) - in hopes the combo would work. 

It was after I was done that I realised that I should have played with shades within each fish, as each body would be thrown in shadow in parts and gleaming bright white in others. So it was a belated effort, an afterthought,  to render some parts of the fish with an overlay of mid-grey. 

It was a conscious effort to keep the flowers and floating lotus leaves in pale pastels so the fish would pop. 

This piece was done under less-than-perfect lighting, so does not bear up well to a closer inspection. Some parts of the scales were imperfectly colored. (*Embarassment*) For this, I blame the lighting in our living room on Saturday night. My presbyopia didn't help any! 

Towards the end, after the nine fish were done and I was onto the flowers, I was losing patience, and did the rest of it quickly, so it's not one of my best efforts.

Carnations

 

After seeing my drawing of Marutaro (see preceding post), a long-time friend asked if I could draw some carnations for her - specifically, red ones. She didn't say so, but I knew they are her favourite flower; she had held a bunch of them in her bridal bouquet. (She's now a mum three times over, and the children are in their 20s.)

I turned to good ol' Dr Google for photos of carnations and picked a reference picture to work from. They are a solid red - not the red-and-white striped variety, thank goodness - but demanded no-less close observation on the various shades of red and how to render it like the petals were all folded against themselves within the blooms.

This was first sketched lightly in 2B pencil. The detail work itself was done using my Prismacolor pencils, using at least two shades of red, a true red and Scarlet Lake, a deeper maroon. Coloring them in took two hours or so, rather less time than I expected.

After the petals, the stems and leaves were a breeze. They were done in Sage Green mainly, with touches of a darker green, yellow, a 50% warm grey and some white.

I had to keep reminding mys0elf to keep the pencils at a sharp point, especially to render the serated petal edges.

I presented them to her this afternoon and she was truly appreciative, said that it was great that I had fun doing it and that it was something that felt to her like a blessing as well.

Post-script: My friend has framed the picture, and it now sits atop her dresser. Wow, my work, good enough for framing! (Jan 8, 2017)

Marutaro, Instagram's famous dog

 

The family are fans of Marutaro, the loveable shiba inu who has two and a half million followers of his feed on Instagram. This perpetually-smiling pooch lives in Tokyo with his owner Shinjiro Ono and is also the star of a Tokyo suburb "museum" of all things Maru; it's where you can buy all manner of souvenirs, from tee-shirts to posters and fridge magnets.

A challenge was tossed to me: Draw Maru from one of his photographs. This work took, I guess, five to six hours, spread over a few sessions ... time stolen from here and there through the week.

I sketched the dog lightly in pencil, and thereafter, it was a huge exercise in really seeing what was before me - thinking in terms of abstract colors - rather than drawing from any preconceived notions of what a dog should look like.

The big challenge was that I was drawing on white Canson paper, and Maru, a tan-colored dog, does have a lot of white in his fur. Pinterest was a big help. I learned from posts on color pencil art that even white-furred dogs/cats do have a lot of "color" in their fur, sometimes reflected off their surroundings. With Maru's white parts, I used Prismacolor's range of warm greys and French greys, and also some sage green, a greyish-green, believe it or not.

Even the brown parts took more than a few shades of brown to achieve depth and a fluffy look. The finished work is an improvement on my drawing of Tasha (see post here), but is still not quite there, not as realistic as some of the photo-realistic drawings of animals one sees on Pinterest. But it'll do for now; I still consider myself a beginner!

Another tool I used for this drawing was a white gel pen, a Mitsubishi Signo Uniball, which was indispensable in rendering the bright white parts - the bits of his black lip and tongue, which are wet with saliva and reflect as bright white, and his fine white whiskers. Being able to dot his pupils with the white also made the eyes come more alive!

More color pencils!

The husband bought me another two boxes of pencils while on a recent visit to Sydney.

Both are by Derwent. One is from this brand's "Artists' Pencils" range, a tin of 24 colors. Check its details out here. The Derwent site says their waxy texture makes them ideal for layering and blending. I have started using them for a drawing in my Enchanted Forest book and the pencils are as promised - highly blendable, so the gradations of color are beautifully smooth.  

Doesn't even look like color pencils, huh?
Work still unfinished. 

I'd even say that this set is more blendable than the Derwent tin of 72 Coloursoft pencils that I got from my sister last Christmas. Check out the details of that box of 72 here.   

The other new tin I have will take me to uncharted territory - water-soluble pencils! This second tin comes under the Derwent Academy series, a tin of 24 colours. Details of it here.  I have yet to use it as I have been busy, but I've had fun preparing to use them, haha.

I visited Straits Commercial Art shop a few weeks ago to buy paint brushes and a water pen, the kind with a reservoir and a brush tip. I plan to do a pencil drawing and then go over the colors with water and these brushes for water-color wash effects.

If only I had more spare time.

Li'l ol' me... four boxes of color pencils, all artist-grade!! One could be so lucky.

A pyramid of critters

This piece was quickly completed over a weekend.

 

For the stag at the top, and the pairs of deer, foxes, rabbits and badgers, I stayed with shades of browns and greys, all neutral, and varied the tones within them. I took liberties with the hedgehogs (iridescent blue/purple!) and mice (decidedly jaundiced). 

I broke away from the usual green for the few leaf vines and rendered them in burgundy and blue, inspired by team Aston Villa's colors. A rather pleasing combo, I say. 

All in, a fun piece to do, rather fewer leaves than the five kajillion that Basford is wont to draw!  

Three recent works

It's been a while since I updated this blog. Life called. I have done three more works, all from Joanna Basford's Enchanted Forest book in the past few months. 

 

This bird might be a crow, but who cares? Another exercise in color and light. I don't think I achieved the iridescence that I was getting at, like in this video.  

My next piece was of these two unicorns. I wanted them to pop, so kept the color of the leaves around them in pale sage and associated colors. The result wasn't quite what I wanted. Because I had rendered the horses in grey - one in a warm grey with teal mane and tail and the other, a cool grey with blue mane and tail - the animals weren't exactly jumping out either. 

Maybe I should have done them in stronger shades - chestnut brown and dark silver/grey.  

Their horns: I tried for a metallic look in high shine, hence the contrasting shades of dark grey and white, but it's not quite there, I think.  

For this picture, the eye gravitates more to the loud flower, for which I played with shades of orange and pink. (Fashion's hot color combo a few seasons ago!)

 

This one, I'm quite happy with. I would have just done a straight coloring in of the door, but a picture done by someone else (which appeared online) gave me the idea to try for an old, weathered look. 

I used two shades of brown, a beige and a yellow on the top and bottom edges of the door, creating a gradient of shades. Then I reckoned that the area below the door handles would also have had the green paint worn away from frequent use. 

For the metalwork on the door, I used bronze. The highlights were in white. I don't think the glass inlay in the centre of the door worked. More practice needed to achieve glass effects.  

For the door to pop out, I kept the green strong, and the rest of the walls in muted greys and creams.