In a previous post, I had done mixed media drawings on book pages I had printed and stamped on. After doing several of those, I thought it would be fun to do some artist trading card (ATC, 2.5"x3.5") sized art, so I cut up a few of the remaining book pages and glued them to watercolor paper for extra support. I did a couple flower ones (I really love drawing poppies, and since I have a colored pencil called "poppy red", that worked well!) and then a few random ones.
I really love the pink and blue ones (the one with the plumeria and the poppies), those were my favorite backgrounds. And I think the color of the flowers goes really nice with the backgrounds. I wish I had more of those to go around.
Colored pencil and extra fine sharpie marker on printed and stamped background.
Both of these are also colored pencil and black extra fine
sharpie marker on printed background. I love having a pencil called "poppy red"! When I did these, I actually had to do the pencil outline of the flower and then gesso the inside so I was coloring a white surface. The top one originally was just the pencil on top of the blue background, and the red and blue together made pretty muddy colors, so I gesso'd over them and colored them again. Much better color!
I love drawing octopus (octopi?). This is also colored pencil on printed book page. Outlined with extra fine sharpie and white gel pen. The white gel pen starts out bright, clean white but as it dries it kind of takes on the colors under it for some reason.
I don't know if you've noticed yet, but I love to paint my cat. He's such a regal animal and at first I thought painting a black cat was difficult, because I could never see much detail in the photos I took of him. But I just kind of go with it and have a lot of fun. In this photo, he was sitting under the table and there was a lot of light coming from the window behind him lighting up his left side and the other was much more in shadow and I couldn't even really tell where he ended and shadows began, haha.
Inspired by my trips to Italy, and Venice in particular. I absolutely love all the masks on display everywhere. I took a ton of photos of them when I was there. I would actually love to do a whole series of masks.
A few weeks ago, my friend and I did gel plate printing on some old book pages. She got the book from a thrift store and we had fun making the prints. We had some stamps, doilies and other stencils to play with. I now had several sheets of pages with some cool backgrounds on them, but wasn't sure when or what I was going to do with them.
Yesterday, I decided to draw some flowers on them. I used my own photos of flowers from my travels. For some reason, they were so simple to do and I did 4 drawings in only a few hours! I'm usually so slow. Maybe now I'm starting to get the hang of this mixed media stuff, too.
These are all done in colored pencil with a black extra fine sharpie marker outline.
I took the photos of poppies in Bosnia, the rose is from a garden right out front of our apartment in Scotland and the two plumeria are from photos I took in Hawaii. I see a lot of poppies throughout Europe and it made me realize that I don't think I've ever seen any poppies growing in the US. Weird. They're so pretty.
Well, it's done! Cluster of Plumeria, 9"x12. Watercolor on paper.
I had a lot of enthusiasm for this painting when I started it, but by the time I got to those leaves at the bottom, I think I was a little tired of it. I painted this using a photo reference I found on the internet. Maybe I just can't wait to go to Hawaii and get my own photo references of these gorgeous flowers. Maui in T-3 months and 24 days. I cannot wait to get there!!!!
In the meantime...here's another recent watercolor painting I did of some plumeria. This is about 5"x7" ish....I made a wedding card for some friends a few months back and I painted this inside. The photo isn't very good, sorry about that. It does look nicer in person.
