Successes and Failures

Hello Friends!

Life is full of opposites, and no matter how much I enjoy creating art, i feel that my failures outweigh my successes.  Typing is tricksy  for me at the moment, so today I'll not mince about and I shall get straight into the pictures. 

I'll begin with the failures.  This is my reference photo for everything shown today.  It was an app on Facebook, I think I wrote about it a few months back, whereby your photo is turned into how you would look as a Viking, a fairy, a princess, a Celtic warrior, and more, including a mermaid. This is me as a mermaid.  She has become my muse for Mermay.

I have to admit I am less than pleased with my first two attempts in various types of watercolour mediums.  They are whimsical in appearance.

Attempt one

Attempt two

Then I decided to swap out my medium of watercolour paint and pencils for graphite.  Here's what happened next.  It's quite a difference.

Finally resulting in this

I don't think she's too shabby at all, even if I do say so myself.  It's the first time I think that I've attempted an open mouth smile showing teeth.  I'm not disappointed with my efforts at all.  Every time I do a drawing or sketch in graphite I find myself thinking I've found my best media.  What do you think?

I have to say I really do enjoy working in graphite and mostly use a mechanical pencil with a graphite refill, along with a paper blending stump {tortillon}, a kneadable putty eraser, and a Tombow retractable fine point eraser.  I also use various graphite pencils and graphite blocks {useful for shading in big areas quickly}.  It can be messy work because the sign of good graphite is how dirty your hands get when using it!  

Until next time

Stay safe and stay well

Debbie x

MerMay part 1

Hello friends,

Thank you so much for those of you who have commented on my art. Your support means so much to me. It's amazing what a difference a few kind words can make when somebody's feeling down.

This is what I've been working on this past few days for MerMay. I've pulled a few pieces of work that I've done from other projects as well, because they're relevant. One of our prompts, for example, was pearls and some of my earlier index card art seems to fit in quite well with it.

Seahorse, in this case highly stylised by way of a Dendritic print

or this interpretation of Atlantis 

This is one of the mermaids, I am rather pleased with this one

and finally for now, an image of cetaceans swimming across the Universe.  The colour reproduction is poor, it's not as slime lime green in reality but my new phone does not seem to do well on colour reproduction.

It still persists in raining most of the time here in the west, so this watery theme of mermaids for May, or Mermay, seems somewhat appropriate still!

Until next time

Stay safe, stay well

Debbie xx