Category: Animals

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Animals Photos Sketchbook Pages

Photos from my world

My tall shadow

Hi, welcome to my tall world. This is a picture of me taking a picture of my shadow. I am so easily amused…I guess that’s why I enjoy my own company so much.

Today was a long and busy day and now I’m too tired to draw so I thought I’d post some photos I’ve shot in the past week or so.

Brilliant web

A lovely spider and her sparkly web.

Plump Spider

A nice plump spider building her web–not quite so well organized as Spider Number One.

Neighbor's Garden

A neighbor’s garden.

Alcatraz

Alcatraz as viewed from the sailboat, er…yacht last weekend.

And now it’s off to get some rest. Tomorrow I’m hoping will be a fun day of drawing, painting, and experimenting with monoprints.

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Animals Every Day Matters Watercolor

Seagull (Everyday Matters #90 – Things with wings)

Seagull with background

Watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, 7.5 x 11 inches
(To enlarge, please click image, select “All Sizes”)

This seagull sat on the post by the boat while we dined on Saturday evening. I thought it was curious that this guy would just sit there, only a few feet away, watching us. Then someone threw a bean from their salad off the boat and Mr. Seagull was on it in a second. I threw him a couple more beans for fun until Cody pointed out that now the poor bird would get gas so we stopped throwing him beans.

The picture above is the final painting. The one below is pre-painting in the background. I always seem to prefer a white background, but the sky was so blue in the photo I just had to paint it. Which do you prefer?

Seagull before background

Same painting before sky painted in.
(To enlarge, please click image, select “All Sizes”)

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Illustration Friday: Smitten

Watercolor version

Ink and watercolor in Raffine sketchbook
(Click image, select “All Sizes” to enlarge)

This week’s Illustration Friday word is “Smitten.” My original idea was to draw my Los Angeles sister’s rescued dove and parakeet that have formed a loving pair and live in a big cage in her little living room. I was going to ask her to try to send me a picture of them but remembered she doesn’t have a digital camera and I couldn’t really remember what they looked like. I guess it wouldn’t have really mattered since I just made this bird up anyway, without looking at any photos.

I started by drawing the idea this morning on a piece of scratch paper that had all sorts of other stuff on it so I couldn’t use it directly. I put the sketch on my Wacom tablet and drew over it, getting the drawing into Painter. Then I redrew it and experimented with trying to get the lines cleaner, but realized there were too many things I didn’t know about using the bezier curve tool and I was too tired to learn them today. I messed around with it in Painter way too long, trying out different backgrounds, trying to draw a cage, etc. I wasn’t happy with the way it looked painted in Painter (see below) so I printed out the line drawing layer on a piece of paper ripped out of my Raffine sketchbook. I painted that in watercolor (above) and stuck it back into the binding. I’m feeling less “smitten” by digital painting today and much more in love with watercolor.

Smitten-Digital version

Digital version done completely in Painter (blah)

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Animals Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages

Illustration Friday: Trouble

Trouble

Digital art done in Painter
Click image to enlarge and select “All Sizes”

I immediately thought of my cat Fiona when I saw this week’s Illustration Friday cue: “Trouble.” She’s always getting into trouble: chewing on electric cords, wrestling with my socks until they’re in shreds, jumping on my head when I’m sleeping in the middle of the night, or walking across a painting and tracking wet paint everywhere…I could go on and on. So I decided to get even and give her a little trouble, even if it’s just in a picture. (But don’t worry, I have no cat door, no raccoons, and love little Fiona dearly, even though she is a naughty girl.)

I also thought of raccoons because I know how much trouble they can cause. My friend Susie had a family of them living in her attic, which was a terrible nightmare since they were were not at all house-trained and had no manners when it came to eating walls and other important stuff. If you’ve seen the cult documentary, Grey Gardens you know what raccoons can do to a house. I knew someone who had a pet raccoon when I was in college. It was really sweet, with the softest little leathery hands, but frequently tore the place apart, opening all the kitchen cabinets and feasting on their contents.

A technical note: Yippee! I’ve solved the Painter conversion problem. I bought a new monitor to hook up to my laptop and ran it through it’s color calibration program before painting. When I transferred the file to my desktop PC with Photoshop, the colors transferred correctly. I could see that the laptop monitor’s colors were lighter and duller, thus requiring me to use stronger brighter colors that, when transferred, were way too strong. The new LCD monitor can also be flipped to vertical (portrait) mode which is too cool! What a difference having a 20″ monitor instead of a tiny laptop monitor to draw with.

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Animals Drawing Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Blind Contour Friday: Spooky (Cat)

SPOOKY (Cat)

Blind Contour Friday has issued the cue for October: “Spooky.” I thought my spooky cats would be suitable subjects, though they barely sat still long enough to draw them. In case you think I’ve forgotten how to draw, a “Blind Contour Drawing” means that you draw without looking at your paper and you do not lift your pen from the paper. You follow the contour of the subject with your eyes and your pen at the same time, and if you have to backtrack or cross over to get back to the beginning you do it, all without lifting the pen. Then when you’re done drawing, you can look at your paper while you splash a little paint on it, just for more fun.

SPOOKY (Cat 2)

The cat in the top drawing is Busby and the bottom is Fiona, also known as “that spooky little kittie,” since she’s quite odd.

They’re both drawn with ink in a Raffine sketchbook and then painted with Kremer Pigments watercolors.

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Animals Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Phobia (Acrophobia)

Phobia (Acrophobia)

UPDATE: This illustration was sold to and published in Cedar Wings, the inflight magazine of Middle East Airlines, AirLiban, Issue #99.

This week’s prompt for Illustration Friday is the word “Phobia.” I have a pretty bad fear of heights, though I wouldn’t call it a phobia since it doesn’t prevent me from being in high places. It just makes me feel a little sick. Standing on the edge of cliffs always makes me feel like there is a powerful gravitational force pulling me off the edge (my stomach starts churning just thinking about it). Driving up steep hills I feel afraid the car is going to fall off backwards–I have nightmares about this occasionally–and it too makes my stomach churn. Maybe it has to do with my being tall–which always makes the ground seem far away?

I did this entirely in Painter, first sketching on the Wacom tablet using a digital pencil and then drawing with digital ink on another layer, then painting with the the digital airbrush because I haven’t learned how to use the other brushes yet. When I saved the file as a Photoshop file and looked at it on my other computer that is color callibrated, the colors were way off again. So I resaved the file in Painter as a jpg and the colors saved OK (not perfect though–the white clouds are pink and I had to adjust the color of the green land because it was too lime green). But little by little I’m learning how to work with this fun new art tool.

Tomorrow, Saturday, September 22 is the 10th International Sketchcrawl. I’m planning to go to the SF crawl and should have some sketches from SF and Sausalito to post tomorrow (if I’m not too tired tomorrow night!)

 

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Change (Diaper)

Diaper Change

Here’s my second Illustration Friday idea for the topic Change. This was fun to draw in Painter but I used my laptop so I could sit at my drawing table instead of standing at my desktop computer. But the desktop monitor is callibrated and the color stays the same regardless of the viewing angle. Unfortunately that’s not true for my laptop. So when everything was finished on the laptop and I transferred the file to my desktop computer to use Photoshop’s “save for web” feature before uploading, I discovered that the colors were horrible. Half of the picture was piss yellow and hideous.

An hour later, mucking around in Photoshop, and it’s sort of fixed. It’s all a learning experience but I’m going to have to figure out how to work comfortably and still have the color turn out right. Any tips greatly appreciated!

(Here’s my other Illo Friday submission this week.)

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Animals Illustration Friday Life in general Sketchbook Pages

Illustration Friday: (Ant) FARM

Illustration Friday

Before this week’s theme (Farm) was posted Friday morning, I was trying to take close up photos of some ants that were carrying around a chunk of kitty kibble on the bathroom sink. I don’t think they carried it there–maybe the cats dropped it? So when I saw that the topic of the week was “Farm” I immediately thought of those Ant Farm kits that I always wondered about when I was a kid.

My whole house is really an ant farm. The bathroom ants are the stupidest since usually there’s nothing for them to eat but toothpaste. The living room ants are travelers. They come in through one crack between the wall and the floor and go out through another nearby. The ones in the yard travel around managing their herds of aphids on the roses and bushes. The kitchen ants stay away from food or trash and instead hang out by the sink which makes it quite convenient to wash them away. The ant problem is minimal these days, since I discovered Ortho Home Defense (doesn’t smell and safe for kids and pets). Before that I felt like I was living in an ant farm! You just spray the stuff around the perimeter of the house once a season and the ants are gone. I guess it’s the end of a season (sadly).

I did this in Painter, which I’m trying to learn. It’s taking some time to get used to drawing on a piece of plastic that you can’t turn to draw in different directions. And when I moved the file from my laptop to my desktop computer I discovered that the colors were appearing much lighter on the laptop than they really are. My desktop monitor is big and calibrated and the laptop isn’t, but I can use it on my drawing table.

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Illustration Friday: Safe (Safe Version)

Safe-bears-web

Nice and safe and cozy. Now scroll down to the Risky version of “Safe” or click here to see it.

I originally drew this as a little pencil sketch in a notebook on BART yesterday. Today I scanned and enlarged it, and printed it on a sheet of paper I pulled out of my Raffine sketchbook. Then I inked over the printed pencil lines and painted it with watercolor. (I don’t like working in this Raffine sketchbook because the spiral binding is too big and it annoys me but I’ve discovered I can put the pages back when I’m done painting them. I know this would be considered sketchbook heresy to some but it works for me.)

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Illustration Friday: Safe (Risky Version)

Snake-Unsafe-Safe
It’s best to use protection if you’re going to get close….

(I’m noticing from the comments that some people don’t get what the protection is…Is it my drawing that makes it hard to tell it’s a condom? Should I redraw to make it more obvious? Did you get it? )
I drew the snake on the left in ink in my sketchbook, painted it with watercolor, scanned it, and then in Photoshop, added a new layer and painted in the “protection.” I placed the two images side by side in a new Photoshop file.