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All this talk of Moo Deng, the baby Pygmy hippo in Thailand has had me remembering all the hippo related art I’ve made over the years (there has been a lot!) . These are a few of my digital pieces, done in procreate. 🦛
Well, it’s done, I completed my own 14 day Art Challenge. ✏️ I wrote the prompts to give me a jumping off point to get creative with but it was more focussed on media than subject. (I find subject based prompt lists waaaay too constraining). ✏️ Here are all 14 pieces I completed - there will be a write up on the blog to follow (I can waffle freely on my own website unlike insta where one must appease the gods of algorithm!) ✏️ On reflection, this was a rollercoaster ride. Art is the way I explore how the world *feels* and some days were tougher than others. I really like the collection of pieces together and can see a lot of growth looking back at my work from various amounts of years ago. ✏️ If you did any of these prompts, please tag me in your work - I’d love to see it. Or email or dm me it if you’re not sharing it publicly. I hope you found it as enjoyable and an opportunity to grow into your art, even if you only tackled one of the prompts. ✏️ Do you have a favourite piece? I am quite fond of those pumpkins!
Day 14 is complete. I spent the day in the studio and got very, very messy using ALL my media to make these mini landscapes. ⛰️ I used a double page pre-prepared with acryla gouache in my Oroblanco by @pith, then washi taped off a grid. 🏝️ I think I genuinely did use every media I own - watercolour, gouache, acrylic paint, acrylic ink, pens, pencils, soft pastels, oil pastels - the full schbang. And you know what? It was joyous. 🏞️ Those several hours of play went by like the rest of the world stopped mattering for just a minute. My brain switched from thinking mode, to doing mode. I enjoyed the textures, explored colour, experimented and pivoted and never once was I worrying about, well, *anything*. 🌄 If you’ve never allowed yourself some time to play with some art supplies since childhood, let this be the sign you need to give it a try. It was therapy without tears and mindfulness without the inevitable voices creeping in whilst you try your best to meditate. 🎨
Day 13 of my challenge is an all time favourite art practice - portraiture using a watercolour triad. I select three richly pigmented loosely primary colours and apply them in washes of varying strengths. It’s so mindful and meditative, I swear it’s as effective as yoga for bringing me back to centre. I can lose myself in crowd doing this, which is what I did today - I painted this portrait on my lunch hour in the middle of the student’s eating area! I don’t *think* anyone paid the slightest attention to me but when my noise cancelling headphones go on and I’ve a paintbrush in my hand, the world fades away for a glorious time. This portrait is of @ianlawman of @helpmyhouseishaunted fame. Me and the husband adore this show - we want to believe in the paranormal and this show is fantastic for likeminded souls. Ian is an ordained exorcist and psychic and seems like a very gentle, kind soul. I really respect him and feel he is genuine in all that he does. So he was my muse for today’s prompt. The paints I chose were three favourites I use for this sort of traffic palette for portraiture: 🧡 Aussie red gold 🩷 Quinacridone magenta 💙 Sodalite genuine All @danielsmithartistsmaterials watercolours on Baohong cotton cold press paper with a silver black velvet brush medium sized round @silverbrushltd
Day 12 was Sketch Journalling. I draw items from my day including some of the food I ate, the map of the route I took dropping hubby off at the 🚂 then heading to work👩🏻‍🎓, the book I am re-reading and the adorable little sausage doggy plushie we bought that we called Chip (O’Lata) 😂 There’s no rules with this sort of art journal practice. I chose to go down the pen and wash route with my watercolours, finishing with some neocolors and pencils but *any* art style goes here. It can be fun/cute/serious/joyful/cathartic - you name it, sketch journaling is there with you whatever you are going through. I don’t do it daily any more but I value it greatly when I do do it. #drawyourday #drawyourworld
My sketchbook has a canvas cover designed to be decorated, so it was just PERFECT for today’s prompt - acrylics. 🦆 🎨 I used acrylics in the form of inks, markers and paints from a tube and had terrific fun pushing buttery paint around into the shape of a duckie! 🦆 🎨 It’s not much of a secret that I am a huge animal lover, and I try hard not to play favourites but birds and ducks are just *beautiful* muses to me so they regularly feature in my art. 🦆 🎨 This sketchbook is by @clairefontaineuk and has 300gsm hot press 100% cotton in it. As I take it everywhere, it had gotten mucky (hence me painting over it with a duckie!). But I do love these sketchbooks, and recommend them if you can find them - they are hard to hunt down! 🦆🎨
This was a fun one - making a repeating pattern, using @procreate on my iPad. The artwork comes from a series of original watercolour paintings (available to buy on my website, link in bio) I did which I called “Favourite Things”. ☕️ I picked some of the items which were my own favourites from the collection. 🫖 It’s super easy to make repeating patterns on the iPad, once you have scanned in and edited up your artwork, it’s easy peasy and fast to make this yourself. 🧸 It felt like cheating as I didn’t technically draw today but what I did was create this brand new piece of art digitally, which doesn’t exist in real life. Which is pretty darn cool really. ✏️ What are a few of your favourite things? 📚 Patr0ns get a discount which applies to all of my shop including original art btw ☺️
Oh I loved this one, an eye for Day 9’s prompt of analogous colour palette. Like so many artists before me, I’m captivated by eyes and trying to replicate them in art. 🎨 This was done fast on my lunch break, holding my phone as a camera in one hand as I couldn’t find anywhere to perch it in the canteen! Analogoys palettes are 3-5 colours close together on the colour wheel. Best used with limited use of actual colour mixing or it gets muddy fast, but some mud adds welcome drama to the eye. 🎨 This is also a practice I love to do that I highly recommend you try - chose a palette of colours which don’t exist in your subject. It’s so much fun and good practice for tonal studies as you need to focus on the value of the colour more so than the hue when the colours don’t match the reference. 🎨 My colours are all Daniel smith watercolours: New gamboge Cobalt teal Phthalo turquoise Indanthrone blue Amethyst genuine @danielsmithartistsmaterials
Here’s a little recap of my daily art challenge as I’ve just crossed the halfway point. I’m loving this. It’s got my brain ticking, thinking about the next prompt and how I might like to approach it. I’m researching and scribbling notes or doodles and playing with my supplies. I’m enjoying filming the process and sharing it here. It’s a great way to reground myself in some basic art concepts and check in with my skills, to review and look forward. Do you have a favourite piece from these 7 so far…? #dailyartpractice
Day 7 coincides with a very rainy autumnal Sunday, so I took my time with my daily art practice. Or rather ,in this case, my daily art play. 🍁 Mixed media and impressionistic approaches to painting go hand in hand, to me. It’s all about experimenting on one hand and then light and colour on the other. 🍁 This flame red forest captivated me when I first downloaded the royalty free image to paint from but despite regularly contemplating it, it took me 5 years to try again. The light is the thing which drew me to the photograph and it took a lot of “bad” art to begin to understand how to capture light on a page. 🍁 I’m not finished with this reference, there’s so much more play to have, experiments to do. But I am pleased to see my skills have moved forwards in the intervening years and I’m starting to see the art I want to create on a page, not just in my mind. 🍁 Media used: @pithsupply Oroblanco sketchbook @dalerrowney1783 acrylic inks and oil pastels @liquitexofficial paint markers @unisoncolour soft pastels @winsorandnewton gouache Platinum Carbon Ink @paulreubensart Haiya oil pastels @derwentartofficial Lightfast Pencils
TW - mental illness talk. ✏️ It’s been a bad mental health day. And yesterday, as much as I wanted to carry on my self imposed 14 day art challenge, I found myself victim to decision fatigue/choice paralysis and I just couldn’t decide what on earth to make of Day 5 Coloured Pencils. So I did nothing. ✏️ You see, it’s coming up to 3 years since I gave up my career as a doctor with my mental health in shreds. I didn’t want to wake up each day & my brain tried to encourage me to make that a permanent fixture. I chose life instead and left all I’d known for more than 20 years. ✏️ I was so sick and so desperate to leave, I never stopped to think about what life would be like after. I assumed after a brief healing period (ha) I’d find myself a cushy middle management job and have the debt from giving up and starting my life over again at 40 gone in 12-18 months tops. ✏️ I couldn’t find work, I’d gained 50 lbs in miserable weight, our debt spiralled. Which of course, was made that much harder to bear with a seriously depressed brain and a history of PTSD and generalised anxiety disorder. ✏️ I’ve been rejected from every job bar the crappy minimum wage ones I’ve had since then. Transferable skills is a mythical notion. I’ve cooked, cleaned, been a shop assistant and now I do admin at the lowest grade on a temp contract. The ducks outside my work are my reason to smile. ✏️ As for art, it’s the greatest passion of my whole life and I feel I have knowledge to share and a voice worth adding g to the conversation. But i am failing at that too. I want art to be my sole career but I have failed to make it viable no matter how many times I pivot, staple my shredded ego together, and try another angle. ✏️ But the thing is, I won’t give it up. Mental illness and bad fortune e won’t take art away from me. So after the tears were washed away, I draw this blue jay in coloured pencil. I won’t give this up, I will keep trying. Because I need it and it means more to me than words can convey. ✏️
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