House/shadow progress

I am making progress here, adding more color, using artistic license to liven the colors up some. I should be finished later this week and will post the final version.

Starting a house portrait

I started this watercolor today. To be more precise, I started the coloring today. I did the pencil drawing months ago! I thought I would post some progress pictures so you could see how it comes along. All the purple is wetbruch on dry paper, the sky is all wet on wet. This is not watercolor paper, however, it is heavy (80 lb.) sketchbook paper.

I was motivated by two weekly challenge assignments, EDM #122- draw something with shade as a prominent element, and Artwords #56 - Dwelling. Any and all comments are more than welcome!

Found my Pitt Pens!

I'm so glad I found my Pitt pens, I really do like them! But I'm glad I misplaced them, too, or I might never have tried to combine watercolor and ballpoint! Well yesterday and today were kind of black and white days, however, so no watercolors; last night I did this Pitt pen drawing on the train on the way home.

New step--Ballpoint Pen & Watercolor!

I have temporarily misplaced my new Pitt pens, so last night on the way home I was relegated to ballpoint pen for my subway sketches. So I thought, well, maybe I can use watercolor with the ballpoint, too! And in fact, it worked fine; I actually kind of like the effect of the blue lines with the watercolor! The ballpoint did not smear at all getting wet, unlike the Pilot Razor Point pen, which smears badly when it does . . .

May Botanical Art Entry -- Fungi

Nothing like waiting until the last day of the month to post a monthly entry! Well, here is my monthly entry for the Botanical Art group's May topic, fungi. I drew it from my friend Christine's Flickr photostream, where she has many amazing photos of various types of fungi. Christine says it is perhaps a hairy curtain crust. See this link for her lovely photograph:
www.flickr.com/photos/65392689@N00/340811003/in/set-72157...

This is pencil outline with color pencil, a mix of Prismacolor mainly and whatever other ones I happened to have that were the right colors.

The French Bustle -- EDM #40 and Artwords #54

I had fun with this one! It started with thinking about the Artwords topic of the week, "bustle." This word could be taken several ways, an individual bustling around, being very busy, or a whole group of people all in a bustle, like on a subway platform at rush hour, or a dress bustle! Well, I chose the simplest one, and went looking for a Victorian costume. But none of the drawings or photographs I found were very appealing to me, then I went back to the Google list and saw some really nice wedding dresses with bustles, and thought "these are PERFECT!" So here is a wonderful French bustle from The Bridal Studio at Leanna.com ( http://www.leanna.com/Bridal/ ).

I did this with a Pitt pen, and then, in order to best show off the white satin material, decided just to use a black wash to color it in. I had a lot of fun and think it turned out pretty well, although the scan does not pick up the lightest parts of the washes. And then, this was just right for one of the EDM challenges I haven't done--"Draw something with folds."

Hair Art

Two drawings I did this week feature hair in color. I am enjoying adding color to Pitt pen drawings, and it just so happens that two of my recent drawings on the train have hair as a main focus. I don't happen to be the administrator of the Flickr group "Hair Drawing Club" ( http://www.flickr.com/groups/hairdrawingclub/ ) for nothing!

The coloring took two different routes here. The first one (which I posted for EDM challenge #118) is colored with markers and color pencil, while the Palm phone drawing was done exclusively with watercolor. As I watch the number of views on my Flickr posts it is obvious that the color drawings attract more views than the black and whites, generally speaking. So I will try to keep doing more coloring. Oh, and if there is writing all over the drawing that seems to attract a lot of views, too! When I do that in the future I will have to make what I write more interesting!