In my sketchbook

Hey its Friday and I'm stretching canvas in my studio, getting a bit distracted...

Lately I've been sketching all sorts of things in my sketchbook, so I'd thought I'd share some of them here.

I'm still fascinated by trees and their bare branches... here is one sketch i did recently. Instead of solid colour I used crosshatching lines to fill it in. I did this randomly but I think next time I will try to follow the texture of the tree.

I've seen a lot of bird illustrations around, I think they're really cute so I had to have a go at one myself. It took me a number of versions to get to this simplified form of an Australian Blue bird (that's me missing the constant chirp of birds and parrots that is prominent all over Australia.) After a few sketches I created a final colour version with my shellac based inks and brush on paper (this time just plain white drawing paper).

I'm also working on creating some Christmas illustrations. Instead of buying cards I thought I'd make them myself this year for family and friends, and that way I will build up a portfolio of images for this season, to submit to greeting card publishers for next year. This one is inspired by my boyfriend Marc-Andre who is an elf this Christmas!

Gotta go and get back into it now - enjoy!

Fall

It's been a strange week for me, and the up and down weather has been dictating my mood.

I came home today feeling frazzled and the only thing that I felt like doing was drawing. I recently bought a new brush to use with my shellac based inks, it's wide and flat with a sharp point - so versatile! I decided to use this brush to create a tree with fallen leaves.

This tree was inspired by a tree on the corner of my street - the colours of the leaves are absolutely stunning, and it was simply amazing how in just a matter of days all the leaves were gone, the tree branches bare.

I was really enjoying myself painting this today, but my boyfriend said it's pretty drastic, especially with the single leaf...

I guess unconciously I needed to express the drastic temperature drop (currently 6*C!) and the fact that we're clearly in the midst of fall. In Australia we call this season Autumn, but what would we know? Fall, it is...