Sketch dump

Here's a quick portrait I did of Mick Aston, Time Team archeologist, who died yesterday. I love Time Team, such a shame it was cancelled, and also a shame that he died so relatively young. Time Team is one of those shows that teaches a lot without requiring massive concentration (perfect for those times it's on tv when I have to cook dinner at the same time =P) and I've always found the archeology very interesting, although I admit I first started watching because of Victor Ambrus' truly gorgeous illustrations (also a crying shame that those were dropped in the final couple of seasons). 

Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3, about an hour and a half.

This was a good opportunity to try out whiskers in this lasso-and-shade style. 

And here are some recent pages from my sketchbook:

A very quick sketch (15 minutes) of Queen Victoria in her wedding dress, from an 1847 portrait by Franz Winterhalter:

A sketch inspired by a mother and daughter I saw queuing for Japanese:

And a couple of kids that were at my cousin's baby shower:

All of those are 0.5 #B mechanical pencil in a Moleskine Skethbook.

Needle Felting: Sheep rattle

One of my cousins is having a baby, and today we went to her baby shower. Never being exactly what you might call flush with cash, I thought it might be nice to give her a handmade gift, so I put together a felted rattle. They don't know if the baby is a girl or boy, so I went unisex on the colours, and her maiden name is Mutton, so I chose a sheep as the base. 

This was quite a learning curve, as I incorporated wet felting, and also learnt how to bleach wool using a mild peroxide solution, which got me a much nicer, creamier colour from the natural wool that's been sitting greasily in the back room for 20-odd years. 

I didn't have a rattle insert, so had to compromise with beads in a plastic capsule – which was really far too big, and very difficult to felt around. If I'd had a smaller insert I would have been able to make the sheep more of a cloud shape. 

The beads and basic shape of the sheep were roughly needle felted, and then chucked in the washing machine and wet-felted. I then needle felted the brown and the details on top. 

The front of the sheep, the side I'm happiest with, is awake:

And the back side is asleep. This side didn't work as well as I planned, but I don't think it looks too bad. 

The beads are sewn on six times with doubled and quadrupled heavy-duty thread, and then the stitches were felted over and the beads felted together, so it's pretty sturdy. The details have also been felted in really tightly. 

Merino and Corridale wool with 'fine' and 'coarse' needles.

Design: Save the Dates

Here's a look at some Save the Dates I designed recently for a lovely couple – I'll be doing the rest of their wedding stationary in due course, but these were the first things up. 

The floral design and colour scheme will be carried throughout the paper goods, and the Save the Dates have a watermark illustration of the ceremony venue behind the text.

Here's a clearer look at that illustration. I did an image search for a lot of potential views of the building, and they chose the one they liked the best. It was very, very small and fuzzy and had trees in the front, but I was able to create something new from it, using clearer photos to work out the details:

I also put together a monogram for them to use with wax seals on their envelopes. I made up a .ai file in Illustrator, and it was sent to the folks at the Wax Seal Shop. The seal-effect here is just a mockup in Photoshop.

Save the Dates put together in Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3 and printed with an Epson Artisan 730 on Coco Linen Ivoire 130gsm.  

Illustration: Traindriving Princess

I always quite liked this sketch from 2011, so I cleaned it up into a proper illustration for my portfolio, still using a limited colour palette. 

For this I created all the main base shapes in Illustrator, using the perpective guides to help with the train. Once I'd done that I took it into Photoshop and scribbled over everything and added the details.

Illustrator CS6 and Photoshop CS6 with a Wacom Intuos 3. 

Illustration: Fairies

I wanted to use the Fairy sample I did back in April in my portfolio, and wanted something more illustrative to go with it. As I already had a whole sketched fairy, and had designed the character of the little girl, I came up with something that would use what I'd already done.

Here's a look at my process:

I did a rough sketch on paper to work out where I wanted things:

As I had lots of overlapping characters I then scanned this in so that I could draw each character separately and move them around to get the best effect. At this point my computer decided to completely give up the ghost, so I had to use an old laptop and an old tablet... resulting in less than stellar sketching. =P One of the fairies is lifted directly from my original sketching in April:

I printed that out and used layout paper to draw over the top until I had a sketch I was happy with:

Then I traced it onto watercolour paper, and inked with fineline pens:

Now I could finally break out the watercolours:

When I'd finished painting I took it into Photoshop to add some fairydust.

Winsor & Newton watercolours with Series 7 brushes on Moleskine watercolour paper, Artline Drawing System pens, white acrylic, Adobe Photoshop CS6.

I'm not entirely sure how long it took, being as it was interrupted by one dying computer, one new computer that had to be set up, and one migraine.... probably somewhere in the region of 15 – 20 hours. 

Needle Felting: Kimono Girl

Here's my latest needle felting creation. My lovely friend Tilly gave me a book on needle felting (Wool Toys and Friends by Laurie Sharp) which she picked up at the recent Perth Craft Fair. I myself picked up a couple of new wool colours at the Craft Fair (although there is still almost no stuff for needle felting available, and the colour selection was extremely limited – but so was my budget, so there we are =P) so I was able to branch out a bit. I thought I'd make something from the book, and picked a little Japanese figure (Tilly does Japanese, and studied there for a few months while at uni).... and then got carried away and completely changed it, so the project in the book is really only a lauchpad by now. 

It was lots of fun doing all the little details. I still need a lot of practice with faces, but I don't think this is too bad for a first attempt.

A shot with my hand, to show size:

Here's a look at the original project in the book, so you can see how far I pushed it (or how bad I am at following instructions, whichever way you want to look at it =P)

photo from Craftside

Merino and Corriedale wool with 'fine' and 'coarse' needles (no, no idea what gauge they are, the packet doesn't say). 

More needle felting projects.