Daily Archives: September 9, 2017

The Wild Pacific Trail

September 9, 2017by karencomics Leave a comment

When first I embarked on this attempt to tell about my inspiring two weeks on the west coast of Vancouver Island, I thought seven days would be plenty. It’s not. […]

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It's an artist's life

Comics Class
Watercolour Basics
Watercolour Wizardry
Technique of the Week
Polymer Clay maquettes

Upcoming Appearances

Camosun Comic Arts Festival
(Click here for website)
April 13 Camosun College, Victoria BC

Curious Comicon
(Click here for website)
May 4 Country Club Centre, Nanaimo, BC

Van Isle Con
(Click here for website)
June 9 Mary Winspear Centre, Sidney, BC

Phenomacon
(Click here for website)
July 6 Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre, Victoria, BC

The Quadra Cats, a webcomic

When the neighbourhood cats meet a takeout-obsessed Alien Cat, they become impromptu ambassadors for Earth! Updates Mondays and Thursdays.

Mermaid Music, a webcomic!

Mermaid music is the story of a girl who accidentally runs away to sea, and finds herself in deep water indeed! Click the image to read the webcomic from the beginning.

All text and images © Karen Gillmore 2014 -2017

...except as otherwise noted. If you share, please link back to this blog — you'll feel a warm glow right in your karma!

Celtic Art

Wolf and the Stones (pen & ink, watercolour, coloured pencil)

Wolf and the Stones (pen & ink)

Eostre (pen & ink, watercolour, coloured pencil)

Eostre (pen & ink)

Celtic Green Man (pen & ink, watercolour)

Celtic Green Man (pen & ink)

Celtic Dragon (pen & ink, embellished version)

Celtic Dragon (pen & ink, outline version)

Elemental Steed: Air (acrylic)

Elemental Steed: Water (acrylic)

Elemental Steed: Fire (acrylic)

Elemental Steed: Earth (acrylic)

Elemental Manifestations: Water (pen & ink, watercolour, collage)

Elemental Manifestations: Fire (pen & ink, watercolour, collage)

Elemental Manifestations: Air (pen & ink, watercolour, collage)

Elemental Manifestations: Earth (pen & ink, watercolour, collage)

Celtic Seahorses (linocut on banana paper)

Celtic Seahorses (pen and ink)

Celtic Seahorses (pen & ink, watercolour, coloured pencil)

Coloured Pencil

“Two Lips” — from a photo I snapped of a bunch of tulips someone had given me. As the petals started to fall away, they got more and more interesting. This one took quite a long time, lots of burnishing.

“White Rose” — I took a bunch of white silk roses into a class I was teaching one day, and we all had a good time trying to make them look natural, adding backgrounds and suggestions of colour.

“Sheltered” — a demonstration on doing an underpainting in dark grey pencil to establish the values turned into this.

“Broken Seashell” — I like to pick up broken seashells, because their curves are challenging and fun to draw. For this one, I used a technique I often use for figure drawing — woking on toned paper and just picking out the deepest shadow and the highlights with white and black pencils.

“Falling Apples” — When I teach a coloured pencil workshop, I often go buy a bag of apples and hand one out to everyone. Apples are excellent subjects for learning how to build up colour from light to dark. After my demo, he whole class goes back to their tables and becomes very quiet for a while — silence is the sound of creativity! One class I actually had time to draw my apple several times on the same page.

“El Morro” — the famous landmark fort at the mouth of Havana harbour. I got really caught up in the rocks on this one.

“Pink Rose” — One of the most burnished coloured pencil paintings I have ever produced. This little thing is the size of a greeting card, and it took me many hours.

“Bear Hangout” — from a photo I took in Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. There were no visible fences, and everyone wanted to know how I’d gotten so close to the bears! Usually I would just smile and look mysterious.

Woman in Blue — indigo and white Prismacolor pencils on toned paper

Relaxing Woman — burnt sienna and white coloured pencils on toned paper; a fifteen minute pose

The Blues — Indigo and white coloured pencils on toned paper _ ten minute pose

Man Forming a Triangle — coloured pencils on toned paper. Going through my sketches, I was amused to see how many similar poses I’ve drawn over the years — there are only so many ways the human body can fold up, after all. I thought this drawing made an interesting comparison with the previous one.

“Golden Retriever” — coloured pencil. I got the detail of the brush in the background by indenting the paper through a piece of tracing paper with a pencil. The tracing paper protected the working paper from the pencil, and I was able to lightly colour over the indented lines with my coloured pencils, building up layers of mixed colours. I eventually decided the white lines this left were too stark, and went in with very sharp pencils in different colours to tone them down.

Watercolours

“Mount Baker Dreams” — The ferry from Sidney BC to Anacortes , Washington puts in at one of the islands in between. This is what I saw from the dock.

“Sunshine” — funny how cats always find the warm spot in the house!

“Bones of the Earth” — a mountain in the Montana Mission Range that has an oddly shaped top above the treeline. It is not a volcano, but I suspect there is a hollow at the top with a lake. However, I did not climb up there to see.

Wickaninnish Wind — This tree stands by the parking lot at Wickaninnish Beach , in Pacific Rim National Park.

“One Perfect Rose” — an anniversary card I made for my husband some years ago.

“Willow Banks” — part of a large wetland park at the base of Montana’s Mission Mountains that I visited once.

“Rainbow Pebbles” — many of the techniques described here are used in this painting

“Winter Tree” — a Christmas card I did for a friend; the white was all masked off with masking fluid, after which I could paint freely, knowing all that lovely snow would be preserved in pristine white paper.

“Storm Building” — I used a paper towel to lift colour out of a solid sky wash for the clouds, then dripped in a bit of grey, then more water for the backwashes.

pebble sampler — I make samplers of many of the techniques during class, using pebble shapes.

Wildly blooming

“Haunted River” — painted over a saran-wrap texture in multiple glazes; an example of mixing paint on the paper.

“Night Lights” — the background nebula-like blooms of sky colour are salt; the individual stars are dots of white ink.

“Long Beach Sketch” — the backwashes created by dripping water into a wet wash created the clouds and the misty effects in the rocks on the right.

“Edge of the Woods” — I started with very light washes to build up the background and lighter tones of the foreground; the dark trees went in last.

Cuban Tree

The UFOs are coming! Or maybe they are flying hats. Suggested by one of the students, I thought it was a great idea. This demo used salt and gouache to make stars and the explosions (or maybe they are fireworks). The city is just simple brushstrokes with a flat brush.

This demo was to blend a nice sunset wash, and to show how to make very quick trees with brush scribbles.

This demo was to show lifting paint out of a blended wash (and add some more for shadows) to make clouds, and how to make aerial perspective by making distant things lighter and bluer. I wasn’t sure what the landscape was going to be, it sort of evolved as I went along.

Demo to show masking (I masked off the blue areas), and how to draw people in about ten seconds! This is kind of a bizarre picture because the blue areas look like holes in the sky, but I kind of like that effect.

“The Sky’s the Limit” — a tiny painting, 4×6 inches, in which I demonstrated lifting wet paint to reveal the light.

“New Horizons” — watercolour, 4×6 inches

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A quick sketch yesterday in #procreate for #opusdailypractice - I’ve been wearing my musician 🎵 hat and doing some recording of my original music! Doesn’t leave much energy or time for art, so I just had some fun playing with the brushes and blending tool. Not great art but I got my art fix! #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #digitallandscape

Not much time today to fulfil the daily art quota for #opusdailypractice (I’ve been recording songs all day!), so here’s a very quick bear in my continuing quest to explore a simpler style in my art. #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #bear #bearart #brownbear #grizzlybear #cutebear #forest #procreateart

Doubling up on the #artchallenges today - a #secretarybird for #zoolyartchallenge weekly is my #opusdailypractice piece. I’m trying for an aesthetic that I’ve never been able to master - simple shapes and colours without a lot of details. I’m not there yet, but getting closer! #procreateart #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #digitalart #birdart

Meet Mousi-Su, dreaded pirate queen of the planet Mrrrit. Many underestimate her because of her diminutive stature, but she has claws of steel and teeth of adamant. A word to the wise: never mention the words “fluffy”, “cute”, or “short” in her hearing if you value your skin. Mousi-Su will appear in the next #quadracats story, “The Kittens of Doom”. #opusdailypractice #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #pirate #piratekitty #piratequeen #aliencat #kittensofdoom #procreate #procreateart

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! A good day to contemplate gratitude for all those you love. Arthur and Boudica are getting in the act here - although they had a bit of a tiff this morning and had to have separate time-outs, they have now made up and all is well. #opusdailypractice #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #catvalentine #kittyvalentine #valentinekitty #valentinesday #kittylove

The coloured version of yesterday’s inking experiment for today’s #opusdailypractice - I’m really pleased with the #procreateapp the more I figure out about using it. Fortunately there are lots of excellent tutorials out there! In this scene, Scatcat gets his educational iZap set up by Alien Cat and starts to learn to use it - with a pleasant surprise (to be revealed later when I get it up on the #quadracats webcomic site). #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #makingcomics #catcomics #aliencat

Practicing #inking in #procreate - in this scene from the #quadracats Scatcat is being fitted with an educational iZap and learning to use it. #opusdailypractice #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #makingcomics #catcomics #spacecats #aliencat

Didn’t have much time today for making art for #opusdailypractice but I had about half an hour - so I decided to try a quick sketch in #procreate with the pencil brushes. I think this was the most fun yet! This is a friend of Alien Cat’s from his home planet. I think I’ll have to put her in a future story! #quadracats #aliencat #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #digitalart #practice #learning

Back to working on the #quadracats - this was a test to see how I would like colouring (or shading I guess) in #procreate I like some things about it better than Photoshop but other things not so much - probably because I haven’t figured out all the controls yet. But it did help me figure out what I need to know next. One baby step at a time! #opusdailypractice #opusdailypracticechallenge #opusdailypractice2020 #makingcomics #procreateart #catcomics #learningcurve

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Monthly Archives

Lots of folks liked these posts!

Technique-of-the-Week — Watercolour Monotypes
Technique-of-the-Week — Combining Pen & Ink and Watercolour
Spam the Cat Becomes a Character Maquette (Part 2)
Technique of the Week — How to be a Watercolour Wizard
A Comic in Process: from Thumbnails to Finished
Technique of the Week — Collage, beyond the Magazine
Technique of the Week — Watercolour Pencils
Watercolour Basics
Practice, Practice, Practice! — Achieving right-brain bliss through figure drawing
Down by the Sea

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