Drawing up a storm

As per my last post, I've been taking a bit of a break from crafting to recharge my creative batteries, as it were.

 

I have still been creating but rather than papercrafting, I've been drawing. :)

 

I've done a whole bunch of sketches recently and have turned several of them into digi stamps. All these stamps are now available in the Stitchy Bear Digi Outlet:

 

 

And I've been playing with the original pencil sketches which I used for the digi stamps, colouring them in in different mediums...

 

I coloured in Flora using my Prismacolor pencils (this scan doesn't really do it justice - my scanner seems to struggle to pick up the subtleties of pencil colouring):

 

 

And I shaded in Forest Elf just using a plain HB pencil:

 

 

I've also done some other fun drawings recently... for a "Draw Me" challenge, I responded to a challenge to draw myself as a character from Doctor Who and drew myself as a Time Lord:

 

 

And for a challenge to draw a crossover of Sherlock with a video game, I drew Sherlock and Watson as, respectively, a Mage and a Paladin from World of Warcraft! :D

 

I'm really enjoying getting back in drawing and sketching. Am even looking into possibly taking some art classes in the summer term...

Playing with paint pens...

Recently my DD1's reception class at school have been working on a collaborative project with an awesome local artist known as Fabric Lenny. They've produced some amazing work including drawings, paintings, wire sculptures, an animated film and a documentary film and parents were also invited to attend workshop sessions with their child and Fabric Lenny, working together on making some artwork for the animated film.

 

The workshop was fantastic and I loved creating art with my daughter and I really enjoyed the techniques we used - drawing on stiff cardboard using black felt tips, using a wet paintbrush over the drawn lines to create a colour wash effect and then adding further detail with white Posca paint pens.

 

My DD1 was very taken with the paint pens so I decided to invest in some and they arrived this week so of course I had to try them out. :)

 

I'd also had a few deliveries recently so had a few cardboard boxes lying around so I decided to try Fabric Lenny's technique for myself. And this is what I made:

 

 

I really like this technique and it makes for really striking artwork. Definitely going to play with this some more.

 

"Proper" Art!

Just lately, I've been doing more and more drawing... and remembering that I actually used to be quite good at it.

 

I've been thinking for ages about making an original canvas - as in drawing a design from scratch. With my new venture in making and selling my own digi stamps, and my recent re-addiction to ATCs, I've been rediscovering my drawing mojo and so last weekend I finally took the plunge and had a first go at making my original canvas:

 

 

I used a pre-prepped canvas board and drew the image onto it, then painted in the image and the background and added inks and texture gels and embossing paste and gilding paste and built up patterns and texture and highlights.

 

It's not perfect but for a first go I am fairly pleased with the results.

 

It has a lot of texture and shimmer that the face-on view doesn't pick up:

 

 

 

I'm not entirely happy with the shading on the face but hey, practice makes perfect, right?

 

Much as I love papercrafting and stamping and the like (and I still totally do!), I feel like this is quite an exciting step for me, creating my own original art from scratch, all completely drawn and coloured etc by me, rather than working with other people's images, in the form of stamps or papers etc. It feels like "proper" art, if that makes any sense?

 

I'm already planning my next canvas... a bigger one this time, I think... :)