This weeks illustration Friday topic was MONSTER, which was great as I draw these quite a lot. Not entirely sure where this one came from, it was originally going to be an octopus with a pumpkin head but as I was drawing it the tentacles started to look like bones. so its a kind of Halloween illustration.
This is straight from the sketchbook and then coloured or rather shaded in OpenCanvas, which is the best sketching package I have found,makes Photoshop look completely cumbersome.

Had an utterly stupidly busy weekend and also a minor disaster. Finished a set of ATC’s, half of another oil portrait a small oil painting and this beach scene. This was from one of my photos taken back in January in Padstow, the sky looked nothing likein this painting.

I’m really enjoying doing water colouring again, after years of hating watercolours I’ve kind of found a way of using them that actually works. The background was just a few washes of different sky like colours. I then used some crunched up bog roll to add a bit of randomness then just flicked a load of paint on. Does the job.

The disaster of the weekend was that I destroyed £500 worth of carpet. I accidentally stepped on my oil palette and then walked down stairs. It looked like bigfoot had been walking through the house ! Opps.

On a different note I was really happy this weekend as I finally saw a woodpecker while out cycling.

Another set of lifeforms, this time sub aqua lifeforms, these were a lot of fun to do as I was deliberately doing back runs in water colour to create a veiny looking background. This is something most watercolour artists avoid but I really like the random patterns this creates. I’ve also got into splattering by flicking the paint brush at the paper which also makes some nice organic patterns.

On a completely different note I got the best bit of spam I have ever received today :-

Hi,

A two leg matrix, the left and right.
Just DO your wake leg and I
TAKE CARE YOUR strong LEG.

Thank you and regards,
Paula

Can anybody shed any light on what exactly Paula is going on about ?