Wash out the sand but never the sound...

In a further attempt to get back into drawing again, I started dotting this. Did it work? It's too early to say. I like the idea but I'm not sure on the style. It wasn't going to be dots and it wasn't going to be sepia but as I've said before, this stuff draws me just as much as I draw it and the dots and colour kind of emulates the grainy texture of sand and sea shells. I'm convinced that things like that creep in on a subconscious level because I only realised this when the drawing was half finished. I should probably keep that to myself and let folk think I know what I'm doing...

I did, however, intend this to be a sequel to the whale ribs in a way; another lonely seascape with an ambiguous natural form. I'm trying to create a juxtaposition between the feeling of awe at the delicate beauty of nature and the sense of unease at such a thing becoming imposing, menacing even (and that is a very pretentious sentence but I can't describe it in working class, "grim up north" terms, sorry.) Or is it just a normal shell and the child who ran off and left her bucket behind really, really tiny? 

Just gotta know if I'm wastin' my time...

This wasn't what I had planned today. This isn't even the skull I'm meant to be drawing at the moment. Ignore what they say about procrastination...white ink is the real thief of time. There I was wrapping a parcel when this little light bulb flashed on, a skull in white ink on that brown, scrappy paper. And then all other items on the agenda ceased to be. (Just to clarify, I didn't draw this on the parcel, that would be some freaky ebaying!)

I started off with just a skull shape brushed on in diluted ink, which looked quite ethereal and ghostly and sort of worked in it's own way. I suppose you want to see it now? Here you go:

Then I remembered a sepia coloured pen I never really got on with and thought "where are you, my old nemesis?" (Yes I do talk to inanimate objects, what of it?) Pen found and many dots later I had a little skull. I'm not sure on the perspective but I wanted to use the natural way the ink had settled as the cracks and fissures in the bone, maybe some shadow underneath would have helped to anchor it down...I quite like how the paper has wrinkled though. It gives it energy, it was done quickly and it's nice that that shows. It's not perfect and neither am I. 

PS, if you're a pen weirdo, here's the pens I used:

Come on let's crawl...

I really love these shield bugs (yes, apparently they're officially bugs not beetles). This little fella landed on me back in the days when the sun shone, so I quickly took a picture before he flew away because I knew I'd end up drawing him. I seem to come back to dots when I draw insects but this is what you might call mixed media. Oooh, branching out! Here we have dots in fineline pen; acrylic ink then not one but two shades of green ballpoint. Oh yes, my friends, acid green biro exists in the world, rejoice! I'd drawn this and inked it up but I really wasn't feeling it so once again it was neglected for a few weeks until I recalled the existence of the green pens (after stating that I had no use for green pens). Now he's a sparkling peridot. Quite a bit more vibrant than the real life bug but wouldn't we all add a bit of glimmer if we were to illustrate ourselves? Don't get used to it, I'll be back in black soon enough. 

Oh heaven knows we'll soon be dust....

I don't want to give too much away about this because it's not really my thing to share, I'm just the illustrator. So in the spirit of science and rational thinking, I'll just stick to the facts: This little skeleton ballerina is part of the dotty Moon drawing I did a few weeks ago. I had to put a bit of distance between me and that Moon, this happens quite a lot but it helps me to think about how to proceed. The end product is absolutely nothing like the original request. The idea was very specific and put me in mind of the art of Roger Dean, whose style is very surreal and sci-fi and one I would only be able to emulate poorly I think (plus, I don't paint, too much cleaning up). 

As I'm still at the stage of putting things out there quickly before I have chance to censor myself, I'm showing this bit off (because I like it) and I promise the full drawing will be coming soon to a screen near you... 

The shadow is cast...

Last night I saw an incredible video of the surface features of the Sun called Thermonuclear Art. I love the idea of that but since hydrogen fusion is a process that requires a fair bit of effort, I decided to get the pens out instead and leave the nuclear reactions to the hearts of stars. So here's a little drawing of the Sun's atmosphere (also known as the Solar Corona) visible to us during a total eclipse, a celestial event that I've been known to get a little bit animated over. To witness the shadow of the Moon covering the Sun from the perspective of the Earth is breathtaking. There's no denying we are on a spinning ball of rock when you experience that happening and we are in just the right place at just the right time. What a startling coincidence!
As a little extra (unintentional) feature, if you look at this image and blink your eyes really quickly it creates quite an interesting visual effect.

Experimentation is an active science...

More dots...I told you it was habit forming! Along with a rarer thing for me, colour.

These little ladies are something I began with good intentions and then promptly misplaced. Having found them again, I decided they either had to go or be finished, so here they are. Ladybirds given a revamp in new, far out costumes. I was going for a sort of experimental ladybird test card using the CMYK colour model that printers use; cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Don't think I'm all techy, I just looked that up. It was an excuse to try out my newly acquired acrylic inks, that's all. They're not very symmetrical or evenly spaced (I just went for it freehand in pen...on wallpaper, which seemed like a good idea at the time) and the colours have bled outside the edges but I quite like them because of that rather than despite it. I don't usually wear rose tinted spectacles to look at my own work but they've made me show these off when I really wasn't going to. I'd better take them off again before anything else weird happens!

Carrying around an empty head...

Now, I'm not really the macabre type but when I came across the delicate, fragile treasure of a bird skull on the coast at Flookburgh I just had to bring it home. It's some kind of little wading bird, though there's so many that look identical to the untrained eye, I couldn't tell you what it is (any twitchers out there, answers on a postcard). I really didn't have any intention of drawing it but I never had any intention of drawing anything, I just don't know what else to do with my hands..

Once I started I got a bit carried away and drew it quite a lot of times, which is an incredibly rare occurrence for my non-existent attention span. These are my favourites, drawn in dots (which is a bit habit forming, consider that fair warning!) Some people refer to this technique as pointilism but strictly speaking, it's stippling, which sounds like a style of painting to me. Although it's pointilism that is actually a painting technique. Confused? Yeah, me too. I'm just going to call it drawing with millions of dots. Genius! Like magnified subatomic particles. Actually, nothing like that at all.

This one is my favourite, the underside. These drawings are quite a bit bigger than the real life skull, I can scarcely believe it once housed a miniature brain. 

A Moon age daydream...

Tonight's moon is known as a Hunters Moon which is the full moon that comes after the Harvest Moon (and that's a lot of moons in one sentence..) It won't be quite as exciting as the supermoon total eclipse we got last month (if you didn't get up at 2am to catch that, what were you playing at?) which gave us a deep, burnt, blood-red moon that looked to me, as it neared totality, as though there were flames licking up the sides trying to catch it on fire. Just stunning! But it's drawings (not moon related digression) that we're here for, so without further ado...

Sticking with the white on black theme, here's something I've been working on this week. Our beautiful Moon drawn in millions of tiny white dots. This is actually part of a bigger drawing so more will be revealed. Stay tuned. Do not adjust your set.