A nine-headed hydra

The left half of the picture

The right half.

This is my first attempt at one of the double-spread drawings in my Mythomorphia coloring book by Kerby Rosanes. I did it over several days, but still felt the strain of the size of the work. That's a lot of sea, a lot of lizard and a lot of sky to cover, and I must say I lost my focus several times over the course of it.

Online renditions of this drawing often put the hydra in green, and so did I. It just seemed appropriate. Some online versions of this drawing have the hydra in a raw, blinding green not found in nature. One could argue that this is a mythical beast after all, and it could technically be in any color, really,  but, oh well... At least, I know that if the hydra really existed, this would be the color of its skin.

Using my  Prismacolor 150 set, I picked Kelly Green as the base color for the hydra, then used a dark green for the parts in shadow and lightened the green with yellow and pale sage for the parts hit by the light.

The underside of the hydra were rendered in putty beige and a deep brown for the parts in shadow.

The sea: The challenge here was to make the water look transparent. I don't think I succeeded, with my palette of sky blue light, ultramarine, artichoke and pale sage. The crest of the waves catch the light, so these parts were in yellow/artichoke/pale sage. The sea foam was in sky blue light and the lower parts of the wave, the darker ultramarine.

The sky: I wanted the palette to be in the pale blue, lavender, pink and peach commonly seen at dusk. The left side has a pinker/peachier hue because that's where I put the sun at, so the clouds picked up this warm shade as well. The skies and clouds to the right were bluer.

The other minor elements in the picture - the birds, the two ships and the world tarot card were quickly done. My reserves in focus were pretty low by this point.

[The tarot card: As an aside, Johanna Basford also does this - "hide" some symbols or small objects in the picture, so that one finds them as one colors in the picture, and they are supposed to be put together by the time the pages of the book are all done to "solve" some mystery. I don't really see the point in this. They distract from the picture, I say. This is why I've usually rendered these objects in non-obtrusive colors.]

My gel ink pen in white came in useful again for the bright whites of the sea foam of the waves, and the highlighted parts of the hydra's skin, where the scales catch the light.

The two halves viewed together. 

A siren

This is my second piece from my Kerby Rosanes Mythomorphia coloring book.

Sirens are undersea monsters who lure sailors towards rocks with their beautiful music and lovely singing voices, and who eat sailors for supper after their ships get wrecked on the rocks... hence the two skulls at the foot of this picture.

I went with purple, my favorite color, for the siren, and a complementary sage green for her fins. I lightened the purple shade to lilac and pinks on the parts facing the (imagined) light source. I colored in several layers of color with a light touch this time, after having pressed much harder with the harpy (see previous post here).

The treasure chest was layered in several shades of brown, and my Prismacolor set didn't disappoint with its sheer blendability. I picked several shades of warm grey for the anchor, from the 10% (lightest) to the 90%, to recreate the sharp contrasts one would expect in metal. The other objects in the picture were fairly quickly done - the fish, seaweed, skulls, sand and items in the treasure chest.

The siren's hair: I was undecided on the color. I had thought to make her blond, but ended up going with pastel rainbow hues. It makes her almost girly, which is hard to reconcile with her grisly dining habits.

I was going to leave the background white again, like I did with the harpy, but decided on the spur of the moment to color it in to see whether I could recreate rays of sunlight piercing the water, shining on the creature's face and upper body. I can't say I'm entirely satisfied, but I don't regret trying.

This page gives a good idea of what it should look like.  This one too. I thought of adding those wavy strips of paler color over the siren's face and upper arms, but was afraid it wouldn't turn out right, so I left it as you see it.

Looking at the completed picture, I wonder now if I should have rendered the siren in a stronger color so that she would pop from the background, which is in the same family of colors. I have seen several other artists' renditions of this same picture; I do believe, however, that colors can be too raw and too strong. Some artists like to go with raw greens, blues and reds. The result seems too garish for me.

My Sec 4 art teacher (RIP, Mrs Woon) used to berate us for using paints straight out of the tube. If you are painting something for nature, the green that comes in the standard set of 12 tubes of pastel paints will almost always never do. Add yellow, she would advise.

Mythical creatures by Kerby Rosanes!

My coloring book Mythomorphia by Kerby Rosanes has arrived, and the pictures are awesome. They feature mermaids, gnomes, kitsunes, dragons, phoenixes... any critter that has featured in stories from long ago.

Many of the drawings are double-spreads, but I chose to start with a single-page one, to warm up.

Harpy. Drawing by Kerby Rosanes, color by Amy

A harpy, from Greek and Roman mythology, is a rapacious monster described as having a woman's head and body and a bird's wings and claws. It is often depicted as a bird of prey with a woman's face. The word can be also used to describe a grasping, unpleasant woman.

I picked a palette of blues and greens for the feathers, and used my white gel ink pen to give some highlights to the tips of the feathers. Yes, colors can be too raw at times, like for the teal colors of the feathers, so I toned it down with some warm grey at 70% saturation. 

I decided against giving her human skin tones, since she does look evil. A dark greyish tone seemed to me to convey her other-worldliness better.

I quite like the way the feet turned out... yellow like most bird feet, but given more depth with orange on one side to convey shadow. 

Stuck for the color to use on the harpy's helmet (or is it supposed to be the beak?), I asked the family. R said "red" but I went with orangey-red instead, since orange is a complementary color to blue. Worked quite nicely. 

The tree and leaves were quickly done after that. I went with a yellow-green for the leaves, rather than a blue-ish green, which wouldn't have provided enough contrast with the main subject. 

The two hidden objects here were the axe and a goblet with lighted candle in it. They are too small to expend that much time and energy on, but I tried to convey metal surfaces with the use of contrasting tones.

Then there is the matter of the background, which I have left white. I posted this work on my Instagram feed with a question: Is this a WIP, or can it be considered finished with a blank white background?

Someone said it's a WIP. Another person said it's finished.

The expanse is a bit too much work for me to color in the background. But I have seen the payoffs from the effort. Some color pencil enthusiasts really do a lot of work on the backgrounds of pictures they color in, going so far even as to draw extra elements in.

Goodbye, Johanna Basford, hello, Kerby Rosanes.

Limiting the color palette, Part Deux

I have taken another look at the color palettes I saved to my board on Pinterest lately, and have decided to continue being more disciplined in my choice of color. (See my last post on this subject here.)

Sites such as Design Seeds, for example, put on display dozens of beautiful photographs of scenery, nature or every day objects which are beautiful because of the way the colors work in them. Alongside are color palettes drawn from the photos themselves, so a photo of cactus succulents, for example, would produce a palette of dusty rose, sage green and deeper purples and pinks, perhaps with cream or warm greys. Nature really does show us how some colors just work together.

The following work, another from my Johanna Basford book, The Enchanted Forest, shows the result of working with a limited palette:

 

The colors are dull greens - no "raw" greens here - used along with dusty pinks, purples and some browns or warm greys... much like the palette for the cactus succulents.

The yellows of the bug wings and the centre of the flower kind of stick out -- a lesson in what happens when you depart from the palette. Or maybe the yellows work, I am not sure.

Another recent  work I did, also with a view to restricting the color palette, was this one:

 

I uploaded this to my Pinterest board on my color pencil work too, and also to Instagram, where it is continuing to draw "likes" -- more than the other picture -- probably because of the element of whimsy in this one. Notice the quaint tree houses on stilts and the green house with Moorish architectural elements in it.

For this one, the greens were yellow-green (chartreuse) rather than sage green, and all other colors were from an earthy palette - browns, warm greys, yellows, ochres and some pumpkin orange. I doubt a bright blue or red would sit well here. It's just a feeling!

This whole color pencil adventure has taught me a lot about color. I find myself looking at things in a new way, seeing how the colors work, such as whether they are in ombre palettes, flowing smoothly one into the next, or whether they contrast each other.

As an aside here: I'm fast running out of pages in my Basford Enchanted Forest book. Will I get another of her works? I think not. She draws far too many tiny leaves that are a test of patience, and because they are that small, they don't offer much scope by way of shading possibilities. Her other books that don't feature "enchanted forests" may have fewer leaves and plants, perhaps?

I've ordered a new book from Book Depository, Mythomorphia by the illustrator Kerby Rosanes, which has taken the world of adult coloring by storm. This is his third book, his earlier works being  Animorphia and Imagimorphia.

And I still haven't given up on making and coloring in my own drawings. It's just that Life happens, and it did happen in a big way this past month, shaking my family to its core and yanking the rug from under our collective feet. So we are picking up the pieces and finding a new pattern to move on with.

I hope to carve out time to do this strangely calming hobby from hereon.

Carousel horses, the stuff of childhood memories

 

There you go, as promised from my last post, a drawing of a carousel horse. I'm quite pleased with this one, considering I went into it without expectations of how well it would turn out.

This is adapted from a photo I found online. I kept the colors pretty close to what is online, but made some variations here and there - some variations are the result of my not observing the photo closely enough when sketching it, haha.

Now I know what those online tutorials mean when they say you can pretty much draw anything. It's not so much in the drawing itself, but in how you see what's there in order to render it in color pencils. I had pretty much gone in and winged it, by focusing on what I was seeing - from where the light hits, calling for a bright white, to the shades of yellow on the body that a casual observer may not notice in the photo.

For the most part, I worked off a very basic pencil 2B sketch of the outline of the horse and the places where there is a clear change of color to signify the curvature of muscle. The rest of the details were done in color pencil (my Prismacolor set of 150).

I picked a 10% and 20% French grey for the base color of the body, and worked in the shades with 70% and 90% French grey, jasmine yellow, black, white, a little sienna brown and my trusty white gel pen. (The yellow was particularly useful for rendering a warmth to the warm grey of the body.)

The mane and tail: I sharpened my pencils and added some streaks through the base color, using a mix of the above colors to achieve depth and texture. (No faster way to learn the importance of keeping your pencils sharp for this.)

The saddle was done first. The reds and blues were layered with other colors for depth, to create shadow and highlights.

Looking back on this, I would say right off that the legs were the biggest challenge. It's a horse in gallop, so it was a bit of a struggle to get the legs positioned just right, and then to use color to show
where muscles rippled or where the bones and ligaments showed through the skin. The front right leg still doesn't look right, haha.

The drawing has attracted a dozen "likes" (and counting) on my Instagram account - not bad, considering I don't have that many followers!

Going through a rainbow

These two pages were facing each other in my Johanna Basford Enchanted Forest book, the top pic on the left-hand side page, and the bottom pic on the right side, so it was a garland of leaves tripping across a double-spread.

Fresh from my previous exercises in keeping to one color, I rendered these two pages in the colors of the rainbow, starting with blue to blue-green, then grading over to greens with progressively more yellow until the yellows took over.

Next, with the addition of increasing amounts of red, the yellows morphed into orange; then with the addition of more reds, the garland turned from orangey-red to blue-red, then over to purple, starting with a reddish purple (mahogany). With increasing amounts of blue added, the purple became a royal purple (my favourite color), and then back to blue to green to yellow.

The birds were colored grey so they wouldn't compete for attention with the garland.

I have to admit this idea isn't original. I saw a similar work like this online - also on a Basford drawing - so I just had to try it out myself, to do it my way, and this Basford picture, with a strung-out garland, seemed to lend itself to this attempt. This exercise made me think of color, and how to render the hues so that they "flow" smoothly, one into the next.

VIBGYOR was a mnemonic we learned in primary-school science, with the letters standing for the colors of a rainbow in the order they are stacked. Violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. This garland follows that order.

Speaking of those days of long ago, I have set myself my next assignment - to draw (and color) something from my childhood - a carousel horse.

I follow the contemporary American artist David Palmer of David Palmer Studio on Instagram and he has been posting awesome pictures of his works (in acrylic)  featuring carousel horses. Unlike me, his works sell for money!

I will make my own humble attempt at drawing such a horse next. I won't use his works as reference - somehow, the thought of copying a professional artist's works is loathsome to me - but will use an online photo of a carousel horse instead.

Watch this space for my horse. When I get (or make) the time. As always, work keeps getting in the way.

Speaking of carousels... Singapore's now-defunct Wonderland Amusement Park was in the news recently. A festival that trades on nostalgia for a long-gone Singapore lifestyle is coming, and an attempt will be made to recreate some of the features of that park, which sat on the site of today's Indoor Stadium.

I have fond memories of Wonderland. Dad used to bring me and Anne there on Sunday nights, after dinner. We had such a great time there that the usual Sunday-night pang of having to go to school the next morning would hit even harder than it would have if we had just sat at home to a blah evening by the TV.

The carousel horses in that park weren't anywhere as elaborate and beautiful as David Palmer's horses, but they brought us joy anyway. It didn't take much in those days, given that there was no Internet, TV wasn't in a golden age, and there weren't half as many other entertainment options.

I remember that when the time came for us to take leave of Wonderland's roller coaster, the spinning tea cups and the carousel, Dad would offer another one of his maxims when he saw our downcast faces: "All good things must come to an end."

At the time - I was 12 or even younger - I accepted that as a Truth of Life. I suppose now, with the benefit of age, I can see that it just might have been a tad cynical. Don't at least some good things last?

Anyway, Dad, you are seriously missed, and you have been gone 14 years. Fourteen!  Wherever you are now, a Happy Fathers' Day (slightly belatedly), and a Happy Birthday in advance. You would have turned 88.

A study in reds

I was thinking of this as a cushion cover. I chose red for this picture from my Johanna Basford book (Enchanted Forest) because it gives a wide spectrum to play around with - from the deep Tuscan Red at the bottom left-hand corner through to the bright Poppy Red and oranges and even yellows.

Done, another exercise in keeping to just one color and its related shades.

The two birds were rendered in blue and blue-green for the sake of contrast, because the flowers in that part of the picture were orangey; it's where I chose to make the spot where the light hits.