Clownfish

Inspired by some of my favorite movies, including Finding Nemo, Ponyo, and The Life Aquatic, and by my childhood and family, which has always been full of love for the ocean.

Detail:











Inspired by some of my favorite movies, including Finding Nemo, Ponyo, and The Life Aquatic, and by my childhood and family, which has always been full of love for the ocean.

Detail:

Dragon Hatchling

Another dragon, a sweet little baby this time. This is round two of my digital experiments with texture and brushes, and I think I am getting the hang of things! There's so much more that I could possibly do with this, but I am happy with it as is and I think it is time to move on to something new.

Thumbelina

Click to see it larger!
Here's something I've been playing with for a while-- a scene from Thumbelina, shortly after her escape from the toads. I wanted to try a different approach from my usual and test out some new Kyle T Webster Photoshop brushes, which are all quite lovely. My favorite brush so far has been Gouache A-Go-Go, no surprise there! This was a lot of fun but it also took much longer than I would have liked. Working digitally has always been challenging for me, there are just so many options and it's easy to get stuck endlessly messing about with minor details. Maybe working like this just takes some practice?

Mimes and Rainbows + Owls and Flowers

I wanted to dabble a bit again in digital coloring, and of course this is what I come up with. Mimes Upon a Rainbow.

I love mimes and for some time I've been telling myself "Nancy, if you insist upon drawing mimes, at least have them expressively miming some sort of action." Obviously that has yet to happen. I consider mime to be a highly under-appreciated art form, and I'd like to show my appreciation appropriately, yet I always find myself drawing them as passive and wistful romantics... probably something to do with the lack of color and speech. Perhaps next time will be different, but for now I give you these calm and slightly sultry creatures to look at.

And here is another somewhat-sultry-eyed,  digital, candy-colored confection for you, Owls Among Flowers.



Birds and flowers...two more things that I can't helping drawing over and over! This is actually taken from an old sketchbook page of aimless doodles in black rollerball pen. Seemed like it might be a nice drawing to practice digital coloring on, and here we are. I actually started and nearly finished this one months ago and then forgot about it for some time.

For anyone interested in seeing a simplified version of the process behind things, I've created a new set on flickr called Process: Sketch to Final. I think it will be a fun thing to update from time to time, so please do have a look!

Here's today's Sketch to Final:




Visit the Flickr page for a larger view and description, yes?

That's all for tonight's middle-of-the-night post. Off to bed I go!

Snake Battle

Another digital experiment. Didn't turn out quite the way I wanted, but that's the nature of experiments, isn't it? You never know how things will turn out!

Isn't life exciting?

Box Boys and Gals

We had a bunch of empty boxes lying around and I doodled on the sides of a few with a sharpie. I figured why not scan and color them in? So here they are. I drew them in no particular order, so feel free to read them up, down, left, right, diagonally, randomly-- anyway you please!

So there you have it. I am playing with digital coloring for a change. It's pretty fun.

Oh and here are some of the boxes -