Meerkat in Ink

This week’s drawing is a quick ink sketch of a meerkat. They are such fascinating animals to watch – with bags of intelligence, a complex social structure and superhero strength resistance to scorpion venom.

Here are a couple of photos I took at a wildlife park a few years ago…

He is SO cute!!!!!

The drawing was sketched roughly in pencil and then drawn more clearly in ink. Once the details were completed I then added a couple of washes in dilute ink to give it some tone. Here’s the final sketch…

Trees and Birds

I frequently find myself fascinated by the patterns I see in nature. I love the way that capillaries in the tissues of our own human bodies branch in similar ways to trees. I love the way there are fractals everywhere. I love it that I see these same patterns in the behaviour of mammals and the flight of birds. I wanted to capture some of this is a piece of art.

Although this week’s art was quite simple it was drawn over the course of a few weeks as I’m finding it hard to concentrate for long enough to draw. Here’s my sketch…

And here is the halfway stage in inking this drawing…

This is what my ink drawing looked like when finished…

I just felt that it needed more. It didn’t capture that feeling I had inside. I decided to play around with it in photoshop to see if I could work out what direction I wanted to take going forward. I tried adding some greyscale shading…

I liked this but it wasn’t enough. So I tried colour…

Then I began to think how all of nature has these patterns and how I could represent that sense of “all”. I wondered if a full rainbow of colour might do it. Like this…

I really liked this in the end and was happy to count this as finished. Do you have a preference?

The Ghost Owl

Barn Owls have been known as “Ghost Owls” for hundreds of years probably because of their white-faced appearance and silent flight. I think they’re absolutely stunning birds. This week I made a quick sketch, first in ink and then in watercolour of a barn owl in preparation for a more detailed study later in the year.

Thank you

I’m afraid I don’t have any artwork for this week, apart from a small drawing I did for thank you cards this year after Christmas. My health is still quite poor. My pain is very bad and my mental health is still in a bit of a state.

The Community Mental Health Team have really helped me manage the hallucinations with good support from my CPN, grounding techniques, distraction and antipsychotic medication. The meds have really helped now they have me on a dose which is effective. But this has left me in a bad depression. The depression reduces my ability to do anything at all. I have been struggling to paint and draw anything since November last year. I put up all of the artwork from before that time and it carried me through until this week when I finally ran out of art! I do have some drawings and paintings in process but I can’t seem to get going on them.

On top of all of that my GP has discovered a hormone problem which could be due to the anti-psychotic meds or could be a benign pituitary brain tumour. I had an MRI scan of my brain less than a week after my GP phoned me which was great because we normally have to wait a long while for MRIs. I’m now waiting for the results.

I want to thank you all for bearing with me while all of this is going on, hence the card. I am seeing the psychiatrist next week and I hope he might be able to help me with the depression. It’s tricky because I’m already on the highest dose of the antidepressant they have me on so it might mean having to change medication.

Thanks again!

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This drawing was done using pencil and ink. Over the top of the final picture I use matt acrylic medium. This took the shine out of the pencil which made it possible to photograph it properly. I am going to use this technique again. The lettering was added in post production using Photoshop 6.0.

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I also wish you all blessings for Imbolc from yesterday…