Week 34 - Japan*

For this 'Japan challenge', I am tempted to draw a doodle character in a kimono, but for now it is something new.
I don't know much about Japan but I wanted to avoid being too obvious. So I have combined two very obvious Japanese symbols with a Japanese art form.
It is called Notan. It represents light and dark, ying and yang.

Now, I am not very adept at paper cutting AND I couldn't find my best scissors, but here is my best efforts with the time and resources I had this week.
*Whoohooo! In the picks :)

Week 33 Mythology

One image

I chose the Mermaid of Zennor
Here is my interpretation of what she looked like based on a carving in the parish church in Zennor.
Photos of the carving and her story can be found on this link.

Week 32 Fabric

It's a busy week for me so I needed to stick to line work and not over-do the detail. So ideas of fabric collages went out of the window along with ideas of drawing super macro close-ups of  woven material in pencil or watercolours.

An alternative definition of fabric relates to the walls and roof of a building, and as it turns out there is a London nightclub called fabric. So, here is a queue waiting along the walls of the building.

I started drawing the people at the middle and worked right. When I came to finish the queue I learned that I can draw people better from left to right. Overall, the impression of people is OK even though I would have liked to have time to refine it.

Week 31 Shakespeare*

2 images

Wherever do you start with Shakespeare? There are so many possibilities!
My first thought was to reproduce a scene from Midsummer Night's Dream I liked in a children's anthology, but I saw exactly that image done by someone else and couldn't bring myself to do it too.

Necessity is the mother of invention and I ended up doing two. The first are Malvolio's ridiculous cross gartered stockings rendered in watercolour on A3 paper. I was really happy with how this turned out, but it was my second one that got the best feedback from the group - and again was in the weekly picks!

Here are my doodle characters as Macbeth's enemies pretending to be Birnam Woods. A copy of this is winging its way to Australia - someone liked it so much she wanted to own it! So exciting for me!
*and my little doodles were picked on the challenge blog!!

Week 30 Portrait*

Self portrait time!
I wanted to do a 'teacher look', and not just an expressionless gaze out of the page. Taking the selfie to work from was quite a feat and very entertaining for my daughter!
I didn't manage to completely achieve what I was after, but it's on the way - and I was included in the weekly picks on the challenge blog (much to my surprise).

This is a photo which I heavily edited in photoshop, printed out, drew on it with pencil, scanned back in and edited some more!

Week 29 Love

2 images 

In a quest to keep it simple and avoid the obvious I did two illustrations this week - and I seem to be on a graphic theme with hardly any drawing at all.

I was feeling a little reflective with one son on the other side of the world and the other heading off on his first mediterranean holiday with his friends.

White pastel on black card, filtered in picasa.

I had many ideas linked to what love is, and words linked to love. I settled on combining a couple of song lyrics.

Created in photoshop.