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?

Going underground

I've been playing around with black and white images again.  I've never really found a way of working that I'm completely happy with but I quite like this one.

Tyrannosaurus-Wed

Two of my friends got married a few weeks ago and I made this print for them.  I thought I'd perhaps leant too heavily on the fact that they both like dinosaurs but one of the wedding readings was A Lovely Love Story by Edward Monkton (the tale of Dinosaur and the Lovely Other Dinosaur) so it turns out they are the dino-nuts I believed them to be.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

To correspond with the grand opening of the House of Illustration's permanent home, and their first exhibit Quentin Blake: Inside Stories, the Daily__Doodle had a Quentin Blake themed week.  I still haven't got round to doing a 'Mathilda' but I managed to find time for a 'Fantastic Mr. Fox.'  It's a book I remember fondly, so fondly that I actually gave my copy away to impress its greatness upon someone else.

A close up of Mr. Fox

You can also see my 'James and the Giant Peach' here

Pigs in Blankets

Apologies for not posting anything for the longest time, I didn't realise I'd been gone so long.  I've spent a LOT of time drawing pandas and dinosaurs, and with my thinking cap firmly on but not much in the way of finished artwork.  So instead we have one of my daily doodles.   

Daily__Doodle are some fabulous twitter folks who post topics to be doodled, it's all very self-explanatory but it's a great way to discover things you never knew you liked to draw, and to generate ideas.  

This is my post for pigs in blankets.

You can find the good folks here https://twitter.com/Daily__Doodle

Elephant and Croc return

This is an image I've been playing with for a day or two with some old characters.
Although I was wisely asked 'what happens when the elephant stands on the anthill?'
I remain optimistic.

Elephant and Croc