On the farm

In pen and ink with watercolor.

Martin

I forgot to mention in my last post that I'm veering slightly from the "beasts" part of my blog title so that I can include lots of illustrations I've done. Maybe I should have called it mostly beasts.

I wonder if I could find every illustrator's family in their drawings if I knew where to look.
These are my husband. Posted without his permission - well, without asking first.

Grandpa

My grandfather was very handsome when he was young. This is a watery watercolor I did from a photo I found. I wish I could always see such strong contrasts in faces and model them with shadows.

This is a linocut. I don't have a photo of him pouring tea for a frog, so I must have used one of him looking down as reference.

Tigers

These tigers are from a time when I was trying out what I could do with colored pencils. White pencil on brown paper made me think differently about drawing - the brown was already a color to work with...or around. I made a note on the first tiger drawing shown that it took me three hours to do. It takes lots of careful and small strokes for me to get the texture I want with colored pencil. I'm not very good at laying out a drawing in advance - I like to get going and then see how things turn out, but it was hard to put ten or more hours into a piece before I realized that my proportions looked kooky.

Red and green

More pencil drawings with watercolor backgrounds.

Meerkats

While I was looking at the sketches I've done of meerkats I was trying to remember why I did them. I can't keep saying "I just love (name of animal here)". Probably with most animals I want to draw them because I like their facial expression. They look cranky or serious or happy.
Meerkats are so busy and curious and to me they look like they're having a good time. They're very social, and I like to see them sleeping in a big pile. A lot of times they are interested in zoo visitors - I bet they get fed a lot of snacks when no one is looking.
I did some meerkat signage for the Muenster Zoo - just the ideas and layout suggestions, not the illustration.


The sign asks if you have what it takes to be a meerkat.

Gulls

I did two paintings from a photo of a gull in Florida. The first is in pastel on Hahnemühle Velour Board (So fuzzy. I find it hard (and annoying) to get a crisp line - although I've seen plenty of other people do it).

The second is a watercolor. In upcoming posts I'll show an example of how many paintings I do until I get something I'm satisfied with. For this gull I think I watercolored him four or five times before I was satisfied.


Also, I'm not sure I've said this before, but although I usually work from photos I do a lot of sketching from life. I just never find it easy to use only the sketches for reference when I'm ready to do a realistic finished drawing or painting.