Hey All! It’s been a fun week of trial and error playing and practicing with ideas to improve my drawing skills. I’ve been playing around with trying to get the wispy watercolor marks to feel more natural, I’ve also watched several VODs on Skillshare about prepping your artwork for POD sales, and I’ve also watched another of Karen Campbell’s weekly Youtube drawing…. let’s get to it.

Oh Hey! Bluejay

First up, I rolled the dice and got this cute angry bird from Karen Campbell’s Wee Wing Things. I practiced drawing and making watercolor marks in an attempt to get the paint strokes that I’ve been struggling with… I got pretty good at sketching out this angry bird, and once I deemed these paintings ‘ruined’… my brain finally let go of ‘perfect’ and I stared to actually start making some progress and I was able to play and enjoy trying out different ideas and once I got past the ‘ugly stage’ I ended up liking all of them in the end.

Contented Carl

I picked out a critter from each of Karen Campbell’s Whimsical Watercolor books to practice some more, then I rolled a 5-sided die and the die picked this cat… so I started practicing on this cutie. I played with various ways of laying down the color as well as practicing the flicking wispy strokes that I’ve been struggling with. There was definitely an ‘ugly stage’ and then my wispy strokes seemed too cautious… so I decided to just go for it and add some more whimsy and of course, I liked it better after I just let go and now I can see a bit of a Dr. Suess-ness to them and so I love it more…

Mockups

I started watching some skillshare VODs while I waited for the paint to dry. I found some classes by Cat Coquillette on prepping and selling your art on PODs. I played around with one of my older art pieces and the phone mockup that she covered in class. I had to wrap my head around translating the ideas presented in Photoshop to Procreate… I think I did a pretty good job of taking the psd file and working with it in Procreate, which doesn’t use ‘smart layers’, so I had to do a bit of it manually…

Bookworm

I received an email this week from Karen Campbell that she had this bookworm youtube tutorial up, so of course I had to draw it! It was fun playing around with ink and water…

Repeating Pattern

I had recently watched Cat Coq’s Paper to Screen Skillshare class, and decided to play around with the bookworm to apply my knowledge. Again, I had to translate her Photoshop directions to Procreate, but I think I did a pretty good job… then for funsies, I also played around with making it a repeating pattern…

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That’s all I have this week. See you next time?

Until next time…
~nic