"Mouse with Flowers" (colored pencil, matboard)

Mom had some scraps of mat board she was getting rid of, so I thought I'd try my hand at a technique I've seen Jessica Douglas [link] do some time ago. (Go see her very fabulous art, even though there's nothing quite like this in her gallery right now.)

So. Colored pencil on mat board.

Very fun! Because of the darkness of the mat, and because of the thickness/strength of the board, I had to push my nervousness with applying color with a heavier hand. Very good for me!
I don't have a mat cutter, so the other experiment was trimming away some of the red with an X-acto knife. Feh. I like it OK in the original (better than a smooth edge), but not in the digital versions, go figure.

Also, there's clearly some dust on my scanner. Whoops. Nor am I at all sure that you are seeing the colors I am, and on my laptop's LCD screen, the colors are darker and slightly more muted than in the original.

The original is about 6cm by 6 cm. Yeah, tiny! ANd that's why this image is so small—sure, I scanned it at 600dpi (the scanner whined about 1200, silly thing, though that was before I rebooted it), so I could print it bigger, but ... I probably shouldn't! (Might anyway...)

This picture sold at our local Community Art Show in May. Huzzah!

"Jessica's Shearwater" by Kir Talmage

One of the things that impresses me about Jessica Douglas's work is her use of references in wings, and her ability to work large and fine enough to get just about every darn feather. Not to mention what David Sibley can do (have you seen his bird guides??!!)

I was noodling about on a 4"x6" piece of paper meant actually for printing cards on inkjet printers. As such, it moderately sucks for watercolors, but once I laid in a background (while vaguely thinking I might work at some of Linda Kemp's techniques), I switched to mixing colored pencils and gouache and thicker watercolors, and kept thinking of Ursula Vernon's advice that people will "believe" any lighting and skin tones if you get the shadows right.

Well, I'm not in their class, on any of those counts. I'm not even sure there are enough shadows (there often aren't, in my stuff). And I know I'm working too small and too impatiently to even get halfway to some of their techniques, let alone toward their deeply practiced skills and cool creativity.

On the other hand, they're all teaching me stuff, I keep going when I can find some damn time, and I'm grateful, and pleased with this as a step towards their levels (say, as of a couple years ago; I may never catch up and that's OK too).

It was a sooty shearwater, by the way.

On gear: Shirts and gifts through cafepress; different mugs and totes and doodads at zazzle; and various print sizes at deviantArt.