From the blog drawn.ca, comes 75 Ways to Draw More.  It’s a little book you can make up, and it has suggestions to just get you drawing.  Take anything around you as a subject – how are you feeling?  What’s in front of you?  Draw it!  So I did.

It’s called The Young Lion Hunter by Zane Grey, and is one of those nice old books that has a lovely blocked cover, although it’s showing its age a bit .  In the story, they hunt mountain lions, and they catch them alive, though I haven’t figured out why, yet.  It’s all very manly though.  Oh, and there’s a somewhat un-PC depiction of a Native American.

 

A little light relief

Well, after spending the weekend drawing happy scenes for children’s artwork samples (and then accidentally pouring ink over them, but that’s another fist-clenchingly-stabby-feeling-inducing story), I spent a lovely relaxing few minutes painting this.  It’s Polyphemus – he was a Cyclops and Odysseus put his eye out with a big stake.  It made me feel much better.

Polyphemus

 

Sometimes I get stuck on one sort of thing.  I went through a bat phase recently, and while it didn’t produce much of note, I did have some fun: I thought this was a cute sort of an idea, and one that I might expand on.  It was also an experiment to try and improve my watercolours.  However, the line didn’t come out strongly enough, then I used ink that was too black…

Lately, I’ve been using ver watered-down ink and drawing the line loosely with a brush, so you get a shape that’s a little less stiff and wonky (unless you want it so), then redrawing it with slightly less watered-down ink, so that I can vary its weight.  I should have stuck with that!  I like the shape of the birds though.

Bat on holiday

 

Bumper fun

I don’t know why, but my reaction to the Universal Fun Book is that it would be about as much fun as, ooh, I don’t know, something not fun. Now, I don’t know if I’m the wrong generation for this, but given the choice of being imprisoned in a sitting-room, listening to someone doing excruciating entertainments such as the hilarious ventriloquism acts and recitations, or having my feet nailed to my head, well obviously I’d go for the ventriloquism, but I’d have to think about it for a minute.  You also know that the sitting-room where this takes place would be like a warning picture from ‘when retro goes bad’: little mats everywhere; sofas bearing a pattern of brown, unhappy flowers picked out in flock; vomit-patterned carpets; etc.

Raphael’s prophetic almanac is of ‘more than ordinary interest’.  Only if it predicts that I’m not going to have to do any of the activities featured in the Universal Fun Book.

 

More of the same:

OK, for some reason, one of the treehouses didn’t show up on the last post.  Here’s a nice, modern-style treehouse with all amenities and off-street parking.

Another treehouse

 

Occasional Treehouses

The next couple of treehouses.  One’s a bit dream forest, the other more *Wallpaper reader.

After drawing the big elaborate tree, I wondered if it developed naturally like that, or if it was some weird parasitic tree-nymph-type-pixie creature that changed the way the tree grew, like those wasps do with oak apples.  Also note my awful calligraphy.  Actually, it’s not that bad, apart from the loser letter T.

 

Treehouse of the day, sort of

This is meant to be a fun project, along the lines of artists & illustrators who say “I’m going to draw 18 different microbes a day for 43 years!” except it’s going to be two or three treehouses a week for several weeks.  Actually, the microbe idea sounds fun as well…

Here’s the first treehouse.  Not the first treehouse drawn, but the first to be posted.  So, the first of something, anyway.

A small house in a tall tree

 

Is it… Is it really you? After all this time?

Yes little blog, I have returned, and I promise I shall never leave you again.

Until next time, of course.

I saw this and was amused, so I thought I would share:

Practical Drawings are Necessary. It says so!

There are more openings today than ever should I only take Chas’s correspondence course. And all I have to do is fill the omitted parts in on a lady in a nice frock. So that was three years of full-time art school I didn’t need? Oh, except that it’s from a copy of Punch that was issued in 1917, so things might have changed a little since then

Apparently, during WWI the demand for trained artists exceeded supply.  Time machine, anybody?  Just don’t mention the war.

 

A Pig Standing in a High Wind

 

All new, partly

New website is up.  Well, I say new; it’s actually some of the same stuff with some new stuff added.

But it does have a whizzy plug-in thing that makes it very nice and easy to navigate.   There’s also a new section on props, which doesn’t have very many pictures to look at yet.  It’s not that I haven’t made loads, but just that most of them aren’t beautiful precious things made to be an ornament forever.  Most are quite fun things  which are held together with double-sided sticky tape, and meant to last an episode, like newspapers and jokey book covers.

Still, it’s up there which is the important thing!  I hope you enjoy browsing through.