Weaver bird

 Female weaver bird sitting in a chain link fence. As city dweller, this is how I often observe my wildlife!

HB pencil on 20 x 15 cm paper:

Other stuff I get up to...

Happy Halloween

I have been experimenting with coloring images digitally. There's a bit of a learning curve involved...

Pencil drawing; color added with Gimp.

Some random sketches

I have been taking a break from painting in order to study up on some aspects of art that have always eluded me. How long I'll be busy with that, I don't know, but I'll post the occasional sketch here just to keep the blog alive.

Two still life sketches done from life:

And two in ballpoint pen plus colored pencil, cobbled together from various reference photos:

I have actually been itching to take up the brushes again, so perhaps I'll soon succumb to temptation and paint something...

Random bits and pieces

I can't always just work for the market; I'd go crazy that way. I'm an artist, not a money making machine. And thus, in between, I make time for all manner of random things. Like a fun hobgoblin:

It's the evil hobgoblin from Hans Andersen's story The Snow Queen, with his magic mirror. I may just get it into my head to do a whole set of illustrations for the story, which is on eof my favorite Andersen tales.

A portrait sketch:

And some quick studies after Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, and artist whose work I have long admired:

Fallen things

After an evening storm, another batch of fallen leaves and blooms. Ballpoint pen and watercolor pencil on paper:

Autumn Treasures

Autumn in the southern hemisphere. I have long loved weathered late-season leaves, and this time of year there is such a glut one doesn't know where to start. On my morning walk, I collected a bagful, and sketched some in ballpoint and watercolor pencil...

In the meantime...

I have been rather busy, getting my latest children's book ready for publication. It's the first one with lots of color pictures, so there are all manner of technical considerations of which I knew little when I started out, so I am going through a rather steep learning curve, so I have little time for much else. But I did try to fit in some experimental bits and pieces and random sketches.

I now and then indulge in these rather relaxing and meditative pseudo-mosaics, done in ballpoint and colored pencil:

A botanical sketch:

A quick colored pencil sketch after Van Gogh:

And some experimental watercolors, after YouTube tutorials:

I hope to put final touches on the new book by the end of next week, but who knows - things always take much longer than planned!

More sketches and illustrations

A few more sketches for the Instagram "100 heads" challenge thing:

And some more illustrations for my latest children's book. Lots more still need to be done:

Some random sketches

Taking a bit of a break from all the oil painting, and focusing on another project, which may or may not come to fruition. In between, some quick sketches exploring a mostly linear approach:

That is what comes of growing up with Hergé's Tintin comics - it is an approach that has long appealed to me, and I keep on returning to it.

In the meantime I let some talk me into joining a thing on Instagram, known as 100 heads, in which you draw or paint, you guessed it, a hundred heads. I'll have to see whether I do even close to a hundred, but what the heck, here's the first one:

Time for more than such quick sketches I won't have. Who knows, maybe the project will be of some value...