The Winter Tree

This week I developed a new Christmas Card.

I began with some pencils…

Then I decided to make the large tree surrounding the picture a little less stylized and a little more realistic…

Then I began inking my card design…

Here is the completed ink drawing…

My next step was to colour the card digitally, like this…

When colouring it I first went for traditional red and green colours but I couldn’t make them work. As soon as I tried blue with the greens I was much happier with the overall effect.

I wish you all a very MERRY CHRISTMAS!

🎄

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…

Happy Christmas!

This week’s art is all about Christmas cards. I wanted to wish you all a Happy Christmas (or Happy Holidays if that’s more appropriate for you)! So I made two ink drawings; one of a Christmas star and one of a Swedish Christmas gnome.

Here are the ink drawings…

I then scanned these drawings into my computer and coloured them digitally – one with a focus on Red and the other with a focus on green.

Here are the finished cards…

I wish you all health and happiness this Yuletide season.

For my friends whom I know in person I have also ordered some Christmas card envelopes. I plan to print out these cards and seal them in envelopes of the same colour. As I write this (mid to late November) the envelopes haven’t yet been delivered but if I remember I will put a photo of the finished cards in here once they arrive.

Hope you all have a great holiday!

PS: Here are the final cards. I didn’t manage to get the green ones and had to settle for white ones instead. I’m going to put a small Christmas Cracker figurine in with each card…

A Poppy card

My mum loves poppies. She even grows large ornamental ones in her garden. So for her birthday I made her a card with a poppy on it. I tried to make the background very loose which is not something I am good at.

I didn’t manage to take any process shots of this painting. I think I had to concentrate so hard to get the background to work that it just went out of my mind! Oops!

Once I’d finished the painting I trimmed it neatly with my rotary trimmer and then mounted it on a card. I actually use doublesided carpet tape to mount heavy paper like this. It works really well.

Here’s a picture of the card…

And here is the final painting…

❤️ Happy Birthday Mum!!!! ❤️

Lilies

Lilies – watercolour on cold-pressed paper.

A hand-painted card for some friends dealing with a difficult loss.

Season’s Greetings!

 

Some Christmas Cards painted for this season…

 

The Winter Owl

The owl one was sketched in pencils and then inked with rapidograph pens on Bristol Board. After that I added some tone with Mars Lumograph pencils and scanned it into my computer.

This is the greyscale drawing…

 

Then I coloured it digitally.  This is my finished painting…

 

 

Shepherds

This was a more tradition Christmas card theme of the shepherds outside Bethlehem.  I started with a gouache background on Amazon shipping cardboard…

 

 

Then I inked on the drawing with a Sharpie. Next I painted in some hills and went over the drawing with black and then white gouache paint, giving me a final simple painting like this…

 

 

Once it was painted I cut it out and stuck it to a card using carpet tape.  I used this once years ago because I didn’t have any other double sided tape and it worked so brilliantly I’ve used it ever since.

 

Then it was finally ready to put in it’s envelope…

 

Later I decided I liked the border around the painting so I made a digital version too.  I like the idea that there’s an original painting on the first card but I also like that it’s my finished image how I wanted it on the second card.

 

I hope you all have a lovely Christmas holiday!

 

 

 

Reusing Envelopes and Jars as Art Materials

Art materials can be expensive. Sometimes this expense is really worth it. For me, good quality paint brushes and good quality paint are worth the extra money – control and water holding is better with good brushes and paints are more densley pigmented and less fugitive with good paints. However, it’s always great to find some art resources that can be found for free.

Envelopes

This summer I spent some time experimenting with this. It began when I was watching Star Trek Voyager and felt like doodling. I grabbed a cardboard Amazon envelope and my palette which had a range of paints left over from a picture I had worked on the day before. Then I just began to play with it. I was really happy to find that the gouache paint went on to this surface beautifully and, because the surface was a mid range tone rather than dark or light, it was really super to work with tonally.

This was my first adventure into envelope painting…

The next day I tried the same thing with an insurance envelope. This was a thin, low quality paper and it really showed. The paper couldn’t take any water without becoming wrinkled and discoloured making it hard to work on…

So I decided to only do this with cardboard. I grabbed some old envelopes and used my trimmer to make some small postcard sized canvases. Here’s my current pile…

 

This time I found the painting was even better because I had only reused parts of the card which were clear of printing and belimishes. It really was a fabulous surface to work on – and totally free!

Here’s a close up of my third foray into reusing envelopes for painting…

…and my forth…

I then went on to make a fully painted, small sized painting of a tiny chihuahua on the same reused card the next day. (More of that in next week’s post!)

Jars

Another new learning for me this summer has been that my kitty cat doesn’t care if the water I am using for painting is green, or blue or pink, she will still drink out of it! This is despite her having a cat fountain and two fresh bowls of water in different places! So I did a bit more recycling and reusing. I tipped away the last bit of coffee from a jar, cleaned it out and now I use this for painting. It still holds about a pint of water, but I can screw the lid on if I get up from the table so she can’t get to it. I’m using my trusty old pint glass to hold brushes now instead.

She looks so cute and fluffy but she can be quite a pickle!

White Orchid Paintings – more colour fun!

Today I photographed a white orchid I have growing in my kitchen.  It was a Mother’s day present from 2 and half years ago.  The amazing plant is still flowering!

I find the shape and form of these flowers really beautiful.  I also love the way this delicate green shades into the flower in the middle.  There’s also this delicate pink to the edges of some of the outer petals which you can only see in some kinds of light.

I made a painting of the flowers:

…and then went on to make a card for a member of my family who’s having a birthday:

I found the orchid to be quite a difficult subject with it’s complicated shape and very gentle colour.  It was really enjoyable to work on though.