Every Day In May: Days 24, 25, 26, 27

I haven't been sketching as regularly since May 23rd, my last post. On Friday 24th I had some pain and the midwife at the hospital told me I need to be taking it easier - I had been trying to clear some of the rubbish my neighbour has left in my garden. So I went to my Mum's for a few days and completely lost track of my EDiMs!  I have managed to do a few of the remaining items from the EDiM list now that I am back in Bristol but I'm also finding that drawing is aggravating the pain in my right shoulder blade so I can't do more than one drawing a day.  To add to that, Domino was run over today and is at the vets on a drip tonight, poor little boy, it's one thing after another with him. Hes certainly using up his 9 lives early in life!

So I basically have just picked one a day at random, the ones that took my fancy the most as I knew I wouldn't be able to do them all before May 31st. I have also done a couple of sketches for recipes which are just in pencil and need painting but I will do that at a later date and post them separately as they aren't EDiMs.  Here are the EDiMs I chose:

#24 'Something That Makes You Laugh'
The baby moves all the time, he is so active. But the other day I could see a little foot (I think) moving across me from side to side. It looked like I had a little mouse trapped under my skin!
Equipment: The trusty cheapo HB retractable pencil.

#25 'Tote Bag'
All my bags are packed for hospital and everything in the house is ready...but now I'M not ready. I'm too tired to have a baby at the moment! I've been waking up thinking 'no I don't have the energy for labour today!'
Equipment: Pen and watercolour

#26 'A Screw'
This was so poignant to my pregnancy! I have so many random screws in my kitchen drawer left over from all the IKEA furniture I've been building over the past few months - a chest of drawers, a bed, a coffee table, a sofa and a wardrobe. Seriously, this baby is going to think he's been born in an IKEA showroom!

I was struggling a bit with drawing this as my 'S' pen wasn't working properly and my back was really sore from trying to do the line work. But then I sat outside in the sunshine and had a brainwave over how to colour it inspired by a bit of mesh I pulled apart as I opened a punnet of nectarines. I was actually going to just use the mesh as a stencil and pull it off after painting but the paint made it kind of stick and so I dug out an old bottle of Diamond Glaze to stick it on properly as I liked the industrial sort of effect it gave it. I really loved doing this!
Equipment: Pitt Pens 'S' 'F' and 'M' (Basically because the S has gone scratchy for some reason)! Acrylic paint in Primary Blue with a bit of Titanium White and Buff Titanium mixed in, The red net from a punnet of nectarines, Judi-kins Diamond Glaze.

#27 'Something Sticky'
I chose this one because it was so cold the other day, for May, that I made a cup of cocoa in the middle of the afternoon! Cocoa on a May afternoon, I ask you! However, as usual I overestimated the amount of time I needed to heat it for and it all bubbled over. Oh well, at least it has forced me to finally clean the microwave!
Equipment: Triplus Fine Liners. I used the fine liners as I knew they aren't waterproof and thought that drawing on the chocolate and then getting the pen wet would reflect the fact that I had made such a mess of making the cocoa!!

I've really enjoyed this EDiM challenge and it has helped me to create a little book of sketches to document the end of my pregnancy.  It has also helped to have been posting into a Facebook group as it is so nice to get comments and to see how other people interpret the daily themes.
I am considering embarking on something for June, the 30 Days of Creativity calender but not sure. I will decide when I wake up on the 1st of June...tomorrow!

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!

Wool Illustration - IF

I signed up to Illustration Friday three weeks ago and have managed to actually do a picture for all three of the weeks so far!  I'm enjoying IF, as it actually makes me produce something that is complete. IF gives you a theme, and a week. Well, both are pretty useful to me as I am rubbish at thinking up what to draw and more importantly, I'm ludicrously slow at doing art.  I'm a person who goes to life drawing and leaves with pictures of a model with their head or a limb missing, and a person who takes all day to do a 6x6 inch collage. Knowing that there is a cutoff point for when I can get the illustration in is therefore incredibly useful to me!

Here is my creation, a collage, for IF's 'Wool' theme which ended yesterday.  I finished it and uploaded it to IF and Flickr at around 23.50 last night!

It reads 'Grandma has been knitting and we can't wait for you to get here'.

Medium: Collage, chalk, pencil, and an obstreperous white gel pen. Finding close-up pictures of wool was more difficult than I'd anticipated!  It started off as a quick sketch of some baby booties my mum has knitted. They are actually purple but I had no chance of finding photos of purple wool in the magazines knocking around my home so I made these ones white instead!