Remedy

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau

PS : No sketches of the day yet this week. Work has been really busy and promises to stay that way untill Friday. I haven't been able to spare twenty minutes a day so far. Hoping to pick it up again next week.

Bicycle

When I first read this week's prompt for Illustration Friday ('bicycle') my initial reaction was : Thanks, but no thanks. There are few things I am worse at than at drawing bicycles. I find them extremely difficult to get right. So I thought I'd let this one pass me by. But then I started looking through the entries that were already posted, got inspired, and decided to give it a go after all. I guess that's what IF is all about, right?

This is watercolours, coloured and graphite pencil, then scanned, and the final patern in the background was made and inserted with Photoshop. I made a little slideshow of the whole process. Thought it might be fun to let you see the different stages.

Oh, and although the bike is far from perfect (I think I got about three different perspectives going on in there if you look closely :)), this is by far the best bicycle I have ever drawn.

Warning

This week in my quest to explore different techniques: collage. You might not see it that clearly on the scan version you see here, but the elements were all cut out individually out of paper.

Furthermore, this is actually a pretty accurate representation of me when I've just gotten out of bed. Yes, my hair does tend to do that wildly out of control thing in the morning. :)

Swarm

Felt like doing something completely different this time so I got out the old watercolours. It had been a long time since I watercoloured and although my skills are very rusty and I didn't always manage to transfer my ideas to the paper exactly like I wanted them, I'm very happy with this one! Also forgot what a nice relaxing trance-like state I get into while I'm painting, surrounded by a clutter of brushes, bits of paper and paints. I should be doing it more often.

I love flying fish. These are made up out of watercolour (and salt), coloured pencil and Photoshop tweaks.

Layer

Another Illustration Friday piece. This week's subject didn't spark any immediate associations for me, except perhaps the word 'Photoshop' and that didn't do me any good. So I decided to google 'layer' and came across this great quote (by Woody Harrelson apparently, who'd have thought).

She's coloured pencil on paper and then fiddled with in Photoshop (there it is again), because my scanner is utter crap and almost doesn't register any colour at all, so I had to do something.