Stealth Mode

I was short on time for Colour Collective's 'Fiery Coral' prompt, so I needed something quick and easy. On the day before I'd uploaded one of my Myrna series to Instagram as a Throwback Thursday post, and people seemed to like it, so I went with a Myrna theme for Colour Collective too. 

It was such a bright, cheerful colour, it made me think of smoked salmon and watermelon, so here is Myrna in stealth mode, seeing if she can steal some lunch.

In reality she's more likely to steal your serviette - she's addicted to tissues - but that had already been a subject in one of my Christmas Myrna illustrations last year. =P It's quite common, however, to see Myrna's head just rising over the edge of a table, to see if there's anything good there. Our previous dog was about half as tall, long and heavy, so it's a bit of a shock to have a dog that can so easily reach the table! (we've had Myrna 4 years now, but that doesn't outweigh the complaisance of 17.5 years with a tiny terrier!)

Adobe Photoshop CC2017 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. 1.5 to 2 hours

The Little Explorer

I just don't have time to do anything big and fancy for Colour Collective, so when their 'Khaki' prompt rolled around I decided to slap a bit of colour on this little explorer:

I didn't spend very long on it, and it shows, but it's better than nothing! =) 

Here's the original blog post for the black and white version of this illustration. 

Adobe Photoshop CC2017 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. About two hours for the colouring - rather longer for the original illustration though!

Something Gothic

For Colour Collective's 'Licorice' prompt, I decided to go a bit gothic. And I didn't want to spend too much time with linework, as I'd been doing very detailed linework of landscape scenes for a year 4 geography program all week, and I'd had it with linework and grasses. =P 

So this is almost entirely done with the lasso tool and a big textured brush (Kyle T Webster's Gouache a Go Go). I just added a tiny bit of linework at the end, to make sure things stood out enough. It was cathartic. 

I was inspired, oddly enough, by a photograph in the national geographic of someone surrounded by red bouquets of incense sticks. I realise I moved about as far away from that as possible. =P 

Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. About 2.5 hours.

Cheese Thief

Still super-busy, so I'm still stuck with only the quickest of sketches for Colour Collective. This was for the 'Ceylon Yellow' prompt, and was originally, in my head, rather bigger. But my imagination draws quicker than I do, so most of it was jettisoned. Such is life...

The original plan was to have three mice, pushing and pulling a big jar of mustard on a little trolley made of found objects. As you can see... we now have one mouse, no mustard, and no trolley. But we do have cheese. 

About a to 1.5 hours on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2, using Adobe Photoshop CC2017

Moonlight

I had to think of the quickest thing I could for Colour Collective's 'Iris Blue' prompt, because I have so much work on - I didn't want to miss Colour Collective, but I also couldn't spare more than an hour. 

So here we have it. Baby owlet with the moon, very sketchy:

Photoshop CC2017 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. About an hour.