Birds Of Sorrow Sketch

Here is a graphite sketch I did today, revisiting my quote for the Illustrated quotes and sayings book that my university produced. My quote was  “You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” Chinese Proverb.

I wanted to see what ideas I could come up with if I were to do the project again, and I feel this idea has more emotion and depth to it than the original, even though it was produced much quicker. I think it is really useful to look back as well as forwards, to see how previous work could be improved.

Fashion Portraits

In preparation for New York I decided to focus on the fashion side of my portfolio a bit more as it was feeling a bit neglected. Here is the first of a series of fashion portraits. All of my work is inspired by nature so I decided to create a cold mountainous landscape within the image and to use cold colours.

I used watercolour paint and graphite on stretched cartridge paper, then added white snow-like splodges of paint over the top to add texture and depth to the painting.

 

More portraits to come, and also the finished natural history illustrations. So much to do before New York!

Natural History Illustration

Here are some of my colour illustrations for my information book on fish that I am finishing off at the moment.  I used watercolour pencils on stretched paper, which I only learned about last year. I can't believe I spent so many years of my life working with watercolours and didn't know about stretching paper! It has seriously saved me so much hassle, as my paper doesn't do that horrible wavy thing when it gets too wet.

 Here is my current painting for my next dummy book, this one is on birds. It's supposed to be a pheasant eventually, although it has a long way to go. I do a watercolour wash to begin with to get an even colour and then add layers of detail with watercolour pencil and more watercolour layers until I'm happy with it.

Here are some of the pencils I'm using for my pheasant, so glad I have a big desk so I can lay them all out. I mix packs to get all the colours I want, for example I buy the WHSmiths pack just to get the peach and blue pencils as I can't find those shades in any other pack. The Faber-Castell ones are the absolute best, I got them from my boyfriend for Christmas, really want the 120 pack one day, it's so beautiful, but sooo expensive!