Bluebell Woods

 

A sketch of my local woods in two colours.  It gets full of bluebells, hence the title, but none were present when I drew it.

 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.  

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.

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.