Hidden - Illustration Friday

This week's Illustration Friday 'hidden'

Equipment: Pencil and Promarker Lime Green in Moleskine Sketchbook.

Rescue - Illustration Friday

I feel a bit sorry for this little spider but this illustration was inspired by a true story so it was in fact his fate I'm afraid.  Loxie has no tendencies towards mousing or birding, she is not exactly the finely tuned assassin her species is known to be. That said, she does love a spider. She only ever catches them at night though and I often get up in the morning and find spider corpse on the lounge floor as evidence that she has been having some sport in the night.  On this particular night I was woken up by a great commotion 'holy cow, I'm being burgled' I panicked to myself.  But when I turned the light on I saw Lox sitting by the end of the bed with her (now dead) spider. She looked pleased as punch and was evidently wanting to show mummy her handiwork. I don't have any major issue with spiders, being in Australia got me over my fear of them. But I was very grateful to Lox for the good work she did and continues to do rescuing me from the possibility of them scuttling across my bed at night.

Equipment: Pencil, watercolours, Moleskine sketchbook. Trying to use watercolours last night with Alexander wriggling around on my knee was no easy task but this wasn't going to work if I used pens as I wouldn't have been able to colour Lox black without obliterating the spider. I managed to paint this in 5 minute bursts when I was able to put him down before he grizzled and needed picking back up again. Actually, he is kicking around on me now as I attempt to type this post one-handed. It's been a few months since I used watercolour in a Moleskine sketchbook too. I know lots of people complain about the waxy paper and how it takes the paint but I really like it.

Every Day in May: Day 18 - 'Belonging to someone else'

Okay, so I've got confused and drawn Day 19's theme for Day 18. Nevertheless, here it is 'Something that belongs to someone else'.  'Gosig Mus' is Loxie's favourite toy. He is a mouse from IKEA, although he's really big so more like a rat. I took 'gosig mus' to mean big mouse in Swedish. Lox loves the labels on him, which I left on. If I hold him by his head and shake him so his tail and labels rustle she goes absolutely crazy. I throw him across the room and she runs off and gets him and hurls him around in the air and then brings him back to me so I can throw him again. I love that Gosig Mus has a permanent look of having shrugged shoulders and raised palms in a 'okay cat,  here we go again' manner. Poor thing. I hope that if/when she finally encounters a real mouse it doesn't have to endure what Gosig Mus puts up with!

I really loved drawing this. I initially was going to have it as a pencil drawing as it is a delicate thing but I liked the effect I could get by using the pen in a sort of light, broken way to make him look fluffy and a bit roughed up.

Equipment: Pitt pen 'S', W&N watercolours Cad Red, Yellow Ochre, Indigo.

Every Day in May: Day 7 - 'Freebie'

I haven't posted for a few days as I've been really worried and upset because one of my cats 'Domino' went missing on Bank Holiday Monday.  Thankfully, the little beast turned up howling under my window at three o clock this morning. There are benefits to being a light sleeper and living on the ground floor! I couldn't believe it when I opened the door and he came running in squeaking. It was like seeing the Archangel Gabriel at the door!!  He is Loxie's twin brother who lives with my Mum but was staying with me. He doesn't know Bristol at all and I think he went off and probably lost his tracks. He was very hungry and disheveled when he turned up and has been sleeping and eating lots since his return but he seems fine. Goodness only knows what he's been up to for three night on the mean streets of the city, only him and his maker will ever know!

Anyway, on Tuesday I had started the theme for Day 7. It was a beautiful sunny day and I sat outside to create a lovely sunny pen and watercolour of my flat. But it was at this point that I was starting to worry about how long Domino had been gone and gradually my sketch was getting darker and darker. Instead of looking light and sunny I inadvertently put in really heavy shadows and over-hatched the door. The Stones song 'Paint it Black' springs to mind! Without meaning to I've made it look like there is a big old cloud of doom hanging over our home, which there obviously was! It's funny how your state of mind comes out in your artwork. I've noticed it in myself before and witnessed it happen to other people to.

Here is the result of my attempts at sketching that day. I've also included the little celebratory sketch I did of Domino curled up asleep in my wardrobe amongst my shoes today all content and happy to be home. It's a bit of an odd sketch as I used a black Aquarelle pencil for the sketch which I'd never drawn with before.

My Little Assistant

Every time I use the scanner to post all these sketches, I find I have a little assistant. I spend the whole time trying to persuade her not to stick her paw under the lid of the scanner. The whirring noise of it is all just far too enticing to a kitten!

Super-hatched Cat

I didn't think I had the energy to draw today, but apparently I did! The permanent tiredness of my pregnancy makes me pray for days when I will feel I've been productive and achieved something with the day. Today was definitely a productive day.

I embarked on scouring the disgusting cupboard by my bathroom that I use for housing everything from hairspray to cat litter. I want to put my towels and the baby's bath stuff and nappies in there etc and there was no way it was fit for purpose. I don't think the previous owner of this flat ever cleaned anywhere! So I started washing away the thick literally black cobwebs...and ended up hammering out with a lot of brute force the bottom shelf and rebuilding the upper shelves. This is typical of me. I should've known cleaning would turn into full scale DIY! But it is so much more functional now and is sparkling clean. I obviously then had to deal with the fall out i.e. hoovering all the mess up and finding storage space for all the old pots of paint and sandpaper that were in there (I'm sure I could make art with them so I'm not binning them)!

By the time I'd done all this I was knackered - a reminder that I am in fact 34 weeks pregnant - and guessed today would be a write-off in terms of doing any art. But later I saw Loxie trying to lick the remnants of my dinner off my plate and she was in such a nice pose I grabbed my sketchbook and pen to sketch a 10 second line drawing of her...and that has turned into this hatching extravaganza!

Equipment: Pitt Pen 'S'. I also have just realised that my iffiness in clarity with a lot of things I scan might be to do with the fact that the scanner is by the window and I am always scanning in the daytime and light might be seeping in. I scanned this at night and it looks loads clearer..I think!

Accidental Cat Collage

I've almost finished this Moleskine sketchbook, well I have finished but there are a couple of pages in the middle that I'd made a bit of a mess on so, being the waste no want not type I wanted to recycle them. I stuck a bit of brown paper on one and as I did the opposite page, which had this quick little cat sketch on, fell out (I must've torn a page out at some point! Heaven forbid).  I hadn't thought much about this sketch at the time but I didn't want to lose it so I cut round it and stuck it on the paper bag page. Initially scribbled a white frame around it but my silver marker caught my eye so I went over the frame with that instead.

So there we have it, an impromptu aka accidental collage. Happy accidents!

IF Train (of Cats): A Shady Looking Bunch!

I haven't done an Illustration Friday drawing for a while as I've been too fixated on this sketching people and observational drawing business. But when I saw the theme for this week 'train' it tied-in with something I saw last week that made me really laugh but I hadn't been been quick enough to take a photo on my phone.  I was reading in the garden and I looked up and saw three of the neighbourhood cats - including Loxie - standing on the wall. It reminded me of those elephant trains. They were all looking at me, and on the wall they looked so much like they were looking for mischief.

For this illustration I've had to draw them all from memory and stupidly although I'd meant to draw this across two pages of my landscape sketchbook, I forgot and drew on a page that had something opposite. Hence only 2.5 cats!

In the train are: Front 'The Cloud' a bit of nuisance of a cat as I keep finding him in my house whenever I leave the back door open, and he's quite a scary looking thing with that big old flat face. In the middle is Loxie. And at the back is 'Fat Alf'. He lives in the flat upstairs and of all the cats in the neighbourhood, of which there are a crazy amount, he is one Lox has made friends with. I share a garden with the flat upstairs so I guess she's had to get used to sharing her patch!

Time for a Cat Drawing

I'm so struck on wanting to sketch people and living things that on days when I can't engineer the opportunity to I'm finding I'm not doing any drawing at all! This could work to my advantage though as I really need to do more cat sketches if I'm ever going to get on and illustrate this book. So here is my faithful model Lox. The idea of doing this in the Seawhite sketchbook was to colour her in with an ink wash but I ended up doing some scribbly colouring in instead. She had just woken up and was straight out of her basket so something less 'sleek' and a bit more disheveled seemed more fitting. She is also a perfect model for a spot colour illustration with her black fluff and big green eyes that have a little bit of blue in the middle. She is a beautiful little thing.