The Deep South

It has been a joy over the past 4 days to spend some time in Queenstown (in the South Island of New Zealand) at a really gorgeous primary school. My good friend works as a teacher at the school, so I came down to help out with teaching the kids some drawing skills and talk to them about illustrating books!

It's been a lot of fun. :) Below are some of the drawings by the Junior students (ages 5-6) who I worked with on the first day. They did such a great job! We have here a Princess and a giraffe.

Below are some pictures of character stories that the Seniors wrote based on my drawings! I didn't know that they had done this so it was a really cool surprise when I arrived, and the stories that they wrote were so cool!

Hopefully by the end of the day today I'll have some of their drawings that I can share with you. They are a really imaginative group of kids. The Seniors are aged from 10-11.

Queenstown is beautiful - it has been pretty cold, and for the first couple of days that I was here it was really cloudy and overcast, but yesterday afternoon the sun came out in all it's glory and I got to experience a more trademark Queenstown day - crisp but gorgeous and clear. Sooooo pretty, I can see why people would want to live here surrounded by the mountains. Hopefully I'll get a better photo of it today to share with you!

Bear Cubs and the Beach

I had a commission I was doing for some friends in Christchurch, and decided it was about time I drew some bear cubs! I have been wanting to draw some for awhile - they are so cute and such cool shapes. So I think that bear cubs will be another animal featuring in my Etsy shop once I get it set up! Below you can see the rough, close-up and then the final! Done with watercolors and a little bit of color pencil and pen.

I had ordered these really cool watercolor brushes online and they arrived today! So it was another reason to do something cool with watercolors. The brushes are fantastic - well worth the purchase. 

Also managed to spend a morning at the beach with a friend the other day. It was a great opportunity to gather reference for the forest and bush scenes for the book I am working on at the moment, and also a nice opportunity to spend time with a friend and enjoy creation!

Forest

Trying to do some digital painting and background practice at the same time. :P 

It was supposed to be a speed paint - but I'm not too sure if 1.5 hours counts as speedy exactly. 

Still have a lot to work on, I need to practice using colors more to create depth, and thinking about leading the eye through the image more. In the meantime, it was just a good practice run at slapping something out in Photoshop and not stressing over blending things (which is what I usually do :P).

More practice from fashion photography

Some art updates...

Just a few things I have been working on recently - quite exciting times! 

These character designs below are for a book project I am privileged to be working on at the moment. They are done mostly digitally (roughly and still a bit of tweaking to be done).

And this little mouse is from a card that I made for a friend who was feeling a little 'under the weather'. Watercolor paints and pencils used on this one. 

More practice

More sketching from fashion photography reference.