Shop Small

 Just a friendly reminder to shop in local, small or independent stores when you can.  It makes a massive difference to small businesses.

Thank you to everyone who has purchased something from my shop this year. 

  You can find my shop here

Designing Christmas Cards

For my Christmas card designs this year I wanted to keep things simple.  I decided to make a pack of four cards with two designs using red and white and two using green and white.  The colour limitation really helps me to focus and means I won't get too carried away.

Below you can watch the process video for my Winter Warmers card.  As you may notice I begin with a very loose outline and build the detail as I go.  This was drawn on Procreate on an Ipad.  It's a process I'm new to as I usually do all my drawing on paper first but this saves a lot of tidying.  I won't be switching to full digital drawing anytime soon though.

I had a lot of fun designing knitwear patterns for the mug and on the other cards.  

You can purchase a pack here.

And here is the full set.

Wintry Woods jotter design

 I've recently added some A5 jotters to my shop. They weren't supposed to Christmassy but it's been pretty chilly here for a long time so I was feeling wintry, and really I'd like nothing more that a snowy mountain cabin to myself.

Click here to go to the shop.  

Here's a time lapse video of my cover design.

I did an initial sketch in my sketchbook and then drew straight on to Procreate.  I love how you can watch all the decisions you made.  I'm really happy with the way they turned out.  There's even a cute little 'This book belongs to' on the inside cover, and they're blank so you can sketch or write.  

Christmas cards 2021

 I know it's still a little early, the pumpkins aren't even carved yet, but I'm getting organised this year.  I still have a book to finish so my Christmas cards have come early.  

There are 4 new designs, each made in Procreate, and sold as a pack of 4.  You can buy them here

Last year's Christmas cards are also available as a pack of 4, or sold individually.

 

Mr. Darling and Wendy

 

This is an image for J.M Barrie's Peter Pan.  Mr. Darling is trying to calculate whether they can afford their baby, Wendy.  I always find it a very funny moment as it's obviously too late.

This image was created in Procreate.

The Owl and the Pussycat

 

This is an image I created using limited colour.  There are two plus the outline.  I wanted to try and recreate the looser work I'd been making using paintbrushes but digitally.  The outline is hand drawn  but the colour is added in Procreate. 

Digital work makes it very easy to erase mistakes but they're often the lines that give images their charm.  So I did my very best not to hit the undo or delete button.  Does anyone else find it hard to just leave their artwork as it is and embrace the imperfections?

You can see more of my limited colour work on my website megmclaren.com

Peep! Bookstagram reviewers

I wanted to say thank you to all the reviewers who took the time to read Peep! and review it.  

See my previous post to find links to all of them by CLICKING HERE

They are all on Instagram and love children's books.  Do look them out.

Peep Bookstagram

Peep! is now out in the world and there's a Bookstagram Tour next week if Instagram is your thing.  Huge thanks to all the bloggers and reviewers for taking part.  It takes a lot of time and effort to write and post about books, when you could be doing so many other things, so I really appreciate everyone giving their time for this. 

Here is where you can find the reviewers @ReadingWithKids @TeenyReaders @Booksb4Bedtime @Home.Read.Play @ThisBookIsBrilliant and @KidsBooksToLife who I had the pleasure of speaking to.  The chat can be found on Faye's Instagram feed by CLICKING HERE

One more day to go

Peep! is out tomorrow.  To celebrate I made this little gif of Dot.  She is patience personified.  Unlike my own dog who only stares out the window to bark at passing cars, the postman and the wind.

Peep! is published by Andersen Press and available to buy wherever you get your books.  But please support your local bookshop if you have one, or take a look in your local library.  Libraries and bookshops are the best.

The View From Here

This was my #colour_collective for this week. 

It's the view from my village woods across to the Black Isle.  I made this sketch sticking to the three colours I planned to use.  More and more I prefer to draw from life in my sketch book and only work from that image, as opposed to working from a photograph.  Sometimes I will take a photo for reference but, for me, a sketch really focuses in on what I noticed and what I liked about the scene in front of me.

When I got home I painted separations in black and coloured the image digitally.  Using a black layer for each colour means that it's hard to predict what the final image will look like.  I like the surprise of this.  I also like painting the layers because I'm not very good at it.  My brushwork isn't tidy and my hand isn't steady.  There's an element of it that I can't control and I really enjoy the results of that.

You can see below how layering them on top of one another starts to create the final image.  Colouring digitally does mean I can change things and you may notice that the big expanse of white water isn't in the separations.  That's because I painted it in the blue colour layer but removed it digitally as the image looked better without it.

I wasn't entirely happy with the result but after tweaking the colours and leaving it for a while, I much preferred it once I'd had some time away from it.  Some pictures are like that. 

New cards

 I've added some new card designs into my shop this week.  You can view them here.

Here is a look at the new single card designs.

Mirror, Mirror

Season's Readings

Toot Your Horn!

These Highland Blues are based on my #illo_advent drawings 2020 and are sold as a pack of three.

Highland Blues

Feel free to have a browse around.  I also sell screen prints and risographs.

 New in my shop this week are these Wild Woods risographs.  Click here to go to the shop.

Risographs are an environmentally friendly form of printing. The image is printed using soy ink on recycled 250gsm paper.  It has a similar feeling to a screen print but the printing is done through a risograph machine and so is less labour intensive.  

Book Nook Blue

Another colour_collective.  This time they chose a colour that I use all the time.  This dark blue features heavily in my work. Trying to decide what to do felt odd because I've never noticed how much I use it before.  To do something specifically with this colour felt like pressure had been added.  Anyway, I like the beaver.

World Book Day!

Happy World Book Day!

 

Squirrels and wolves and bears, oh my!

I've been playing with symmetry again but this time I wanted to use it as a base for an image, with different parts on each side to show a seasonal shift.  I started again with my stag motif.  I wanted it to feel very Highland but the bears and wolves are pure artistic license.

I've enjoyed playing more with line and limited colour lately. These feel like an evolution of my advent illustrations which you can see here.  

Here is the original pencil drawing  I only drew half and then copied and flipped it in photoshop so I had two sides.  The animals were drawn separately.

The line work was done in Procreate and the colour was added in Photoshop.  

A few close ups.

I'd like to explore line work like this for book chapter headings or cover art but for now it's very new and something I enjoy playing with.

Mirror, Mirror

This weeks #colour_collective fit in nicely with an illustration I did yesterday.  

Now available to buy as a greeting card.  Click here to go to the shop.

Final image.

I finally finished some pieces I'd been working on this week, had a tidy and decided to have a day drawing whatever I wanted.  And I had no idea what to do.  What do you draw when you can draw absolutely anything?  I usually revert to animals I like the look of, or things I've sketched before but never explored properly.  I find I think best when I start drawing.  I remembered a badger I'd drawn a long time ago so I drew badgers until I had an idea to make an image using only black and white animals.  

I liked that it looked like a Rorschach test.  I've been playing with Procreate lately and there's a symmetry function I hadn't used before and it's a lot of fun.  It's also so much faster to only draw half of an image.  I usually draw my outlines onto paper.  This is the first time I've really drawn everything onscreen. 

Procreate has a time lapse function so you can watch all the decisions being made in real time.  I finished the image in Photoshop so you only see up to a certain point here. 

Here's the original sketch.

What do you draw when you can choose whatever you want?  Do you have too many ideas or have to work them out on paper like I do?

Flawed

I've been painting up some of my #illo_advent drawings lately.  It's amazing to see the ones which work on a larger scale and the ones that don't.  Or is it because I'm not used to painting so my efforts are still hit and miss?

Each colour layer is painted separately in black gouache, scanned and coloured digitally.  I like using a traditional medium because of the unexpected marks and mistakes it creates.  Flaws.  I like flaws.  When I work digitally I always end up tidying too much.  This is a way for me to loosen up.  

If you happen to be frustrated by your process and want to loosen it up too I suggest playing with a new medium for a bit.  Recently I've been enjoying crayons and felt tip pens in limited colours.  I haven't found a way to incorporate them into my work yet but I've learned to enjoy the lack of control and enjoy the flaws.

This is a little hedgehog I made for #colour_collective  They post a colour every week and you make an illustration of your choice.  I don't often get the chance to join in, and I often struggle with a only colour for a prompt, but this week it was a really nice shade so I thought I'd have a go.  Why a hedgehog?  Who knows.  

I tried to stick to the more limited palettes I've been using lately.  I usually make sure I'm happy with the the drawing and then start colouring but I rushed this one and had to go about fixing it as I went.  Some people work like this all the time, adapting as they go, and I usually make small changes but for this one I was making separations.  Each colour layer was drawn in black so they shapes needed to be right to begin with and they weren't.  It's not a huge problem but it meant the process took longer than I wanted.  I should've taken my time to begin with.  

My top tip, if you work like me, is to make sure you're happy with your drawing.  It'll save time later.

 

Read together

Read Together

A GIF I made of a recent illustration.

Now available as a greeting card.  Click here to go to the shop.