Wednesday, March 17, 2021 An Artsy Week

Lots of artsy things happened here in the last week! After I wrote the story about Freddy, I decided to try doing illustrations for it. I looked on Pinterest for drawings of little children to use as a guide and found some really charming ones by Jane Massey. They’re very sweet and simple -just what I was looking for. Using her drawings as an example, I started out with some sketches of mostly little girls and made four of them into paintings. Some of them turned out better than others, as you will see.

Oh, dear. I forgot that I was going to do the outline of the face with pen and tried using the paintbrush. Not a good idea. I learned from that and went on to the rest.

Proportions were weird – the face is unnaturally large and wide, I think.

I like her! Reminds me of our granddaughter. Coincidence? I think not!!! 🙂

Next, I decided to try some sketches for Freddie’s story. Trying to draw one character consistently in different poses doing different things gives you an appreciation for professional book illustrators. Basically I ended up with four Freddies, all of whom look different. It was fun anyway.

I had drawn some little horns on Freddy the Dragon, but they looked kind of devilish rather than dragonish, so I erased them. What do you think? Should I put them back in?

Last and kind of least, I worked on Lesson 3 in the Waercolor Italy book.

The first attempt is on the left. I like the intensity of the orange in the background and on the lamps, but the general wash in the sky is very inconsistent and splotchy looking. I went with using outlines – that’s definitely a style thing for me. Lots of room for improvement! I’m getting more comfortable with the process, though.

Thanks for coming along with me on this watercolor journey!

I’ll probably delete or add back in some dragon horns in the morning, depending on your Very Important Feedback. Freddy is waiting to see how it turns out.