Bonus post: Environmental studies

This post is going to be a bit on the meager side, but I wanted to share a few more environmental studies I did in my sketchbook. I like the first one the best; it has the strongest, clearest values. The other two are ok, but not as distinct as I'd like them to be. But they're good practice and at least the colors are nice. 

onward and upward,

Bethany

April '15 Sketchbook

April turned out to be a super colorful month, which is awesome!! I did a lot of stuff with watercolor, especially after getting some Pentel Aquash water brush pens. The water is stored in the handles and can be squeezed out through the brush, which eliminates the need to carry around cups of water. So basically, I can watercolor ANYWHERE!!! (Pretty excited about that, in case you couldn't tell. ;-))

onward and upward,

Bethany

Little Red Riding Hood comic!!

As some of you may know, one of my artistic goals is to be able to draw comics. Up to till now though, the whole process of telling stories sequentially has been super intimidating to me; I kept worrying about doing things "the wrong way". In order to get out of my comfort zone and into this unfamiliar territory, I took a stab at rendering the story of Little Red Riding Hood in comic form. Honestly, this project is pretty rough; the drawings are simple doodles and I'm sure I made a million mistakes in the formatting. (I'm not even sure if it's large enough to be read!) But it's an actual comic and I learned a lot from it, which is what counts. So here you have it, my first humble attempt at the art of telling stories with lots of tiny pictures, and my first small step towards getting better at something new.    

onward and upward,

Bethany

April Skill building: Cats, cat skulls, and poses

So here we are again, another skill building update! I've been drawing exotic cats (the ones with the squashed faces), for a project I'm working on, and poses, because they're always a good idea. And, as a media exploration bonus, I inked the poses and added some watercolor lighting effects. (Lighting figures is not my strong suit, so the practice is good.) The extra lines around some of the figures are my attempt at getting a thinner pen line. So yeah, lots of experimenting this month!

onward and upward,

Bethany

Mermaid

I was chatting with my friend Dresden the other day and she mentioned that most people only depict mermaids with light colored skin. So, I thought it would be neat to try drawing/painting a mermaid with darker skin tones and here is the final result! I probably should have been a wee bit neater with my pencil work and the values could stand to be a bit stronger, but I was working in watercolor and didn't want to run the risk of ruining the picture. Over all, I'm really happy with how it turned out! ^_^ I also included the sketched version, too, so you can see what it was like before I painted it. 

onward and upward,

Bethany