Friday, February 27, 2015

Haunting a House

The address has been obscured.

This is a custom haunted house portrait that I recently completed.  A client sends me a couple of clear pictures of their house and I draw it in pen and ink as a whimsical, creepy-cute haunted house!  For this one, my customer wanted their address included in the art and their dog chasing a black cat.

This was an 8"x10" paper size to fit in a standard frame.  I used Strathmore watercolor paper, a crow quill pen (Hunt nib 102) and Higgins Black Magic ink.  Here are a few process shots:

First pencil rough on left, Photoshop edit on right

Retraced final sketch

Transferred to watercolor paper and ready for ink

Inking in progress, address obscured

I do these custom house portraits through my Etsy shop.  For now the listing there is for 4x6, but 5x7, 6x8 and 8x10 can be requested.  Below is another completed house, this one at 6"x8".

The ravens were my client's idea!



Monday, February 2, 2015

Illustration Friday: "Jagged"



Bunnies

Happy New Year, everyone!

I'm looking forward to Spring more than ever this year.  And when I think of Spring (and Summer), I think of bunnies!  Oh, who am I kidding?  I'm always thinking of bunnies.

Bunnies are surprisingly hard to draw if you don't want to draw "real" bunnies but you don't want to draw cartoons, either.  I've been working on a way to draw bunnies I think are just right.  This set comes pretty close for me.  But aside from the style of bunny faces, the motivation for this set was that I really wanted to paint cute bunny outfits with watercolors.  :)

These are all drawn with crow quill pen (Hunt nib 102) and Higgins Black Magic ink.  The watercolors are a mix of Grumbacher and Winsor & Newton.  The paper is Strathmore.







These are all ACEOs (ACEO stands for "Art Cards, Editions and Originals"), so they measure 2.5" x 3.5".  They are available in my Etsy shop here.