Sketchbook Roundup 6: The Rest of the Gang

April 27, 2020 · by karencomics · in animal art, coloured pencils, Illustration, Ink, Watercolour, Watercolour pencils (aquarelles), zooly. ·

I’m coming to the end of the hand-drawn sketchbook creatures I want to share as part of this series; tomorrow I’m going to end the series with some digital drawings I’ve been doing.

I’ve been a little stalled on my animal sketchbook lately; like many others, I’ve been in a kind of timeless bubble during this quarantine. I have been drawing cats, though, in the form of my webcomic, The Quadra Cats; this time-out without conventions or deadlines has given me the undistracted time to do some experimentation (including learning a new drawing app) and get a long-delayed story arc under way. Other than that, I have to agree with a meme I saw on Facebook today which asked “anyone who saw my motivation wandering around” to please send it home.

Enough. Here’s some art!

Yak, yak, yak — I had no idea what cool animals these were until I drew this one. I actually wanted to do a picture of one wearing a colourful Tibetan saddle, but couldn’t resist the action in this one’s pose. Ink and coloured pencil.

A Northern Flicker, one of our local woodpeckers. One thing I really like about using watercolour pencils in the sketchbook is that the sketchbook paper doesn’t really take watercolour paint well; it just soaks in and gets blotchy without spreading. The watercolour pencils enable me to spread out the “paint” first, then get it wet so that there’s better coverage. Plus they retain some of the drawing textures as well, if the water is lightly applied.
Ink and watercolour pencil.

These crazy expressions are just part of the range of the Pallas’ Cat. I have got to make one a character in a comic sometime, they are just made for it. For some reason, this page generated a sudden spike in likes on my Instagram, over double my top post before or since. I have no idea why this is; perhaps there is a secret society of Pallas’ Cat lovers out there somewhere?
Coloured pencil.

Closeup from a page of Javelinas that I did (another below). I have a friend whose yard in the southwest US is regularly visited by these guys, and I fell in love with them the first time I saw her photos and wanted to draw them (this is not from one of her photos, however).
Ink and watercolour.

This is a pretty tiny drawing, not much bigger than those sketch cards I posted yesterday. The babies are so adorable, I wanted to do bunches of them, but ran out of space on the page.
Ink and watercolour.

OK, bear with me now. I was practicing drawing black bears for a couple of different illustration projects, so I did a page of them, too. Here’s a detail.
Ink and watercolour.

Here’s the whole page, done over several days. I really like doing these kind of mish-mash pages; there’s a freedom in not having to make a finished composition, just cramming in as many little drawings as I can on one page.
Ink, watercolour, gouache, and coloured pencil.

The commission I was working on involved bear cubs in a tree, so I found as many pictures of cubs in trees as I could to practice drawing them in different positions. By the time I got to laying out the painting, I understood how they balanced and held on to seemingly impossible looking perches.
Ink over pencil sketch

And oh my, one more, why not? This was done from a photo of the replica mammoth the Royal BC Museum, Woolly. I’ve seen this guy many times (the diorama is stunning) but never twigged that it wasn’t a real stuffed mammoth — like unfrozen from the tundra or something and taxidermy-ized. Turns out there was quite a process in making it; you can read about it here.
Watercolour and a bit of ink.

That’s it for my Sketchbook Roundup series; I’ll be back tomorrow with one final animal-art post, focussing on my favourite new drawing app, Procreate!

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Tags: bear, black bear, javelina, manul, Northern Flicker, pallas cat, woodpecker, woolly mammoth, Yak

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Comics Class
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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.

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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.