Let’s Draw SHETLAND SCOTLAND! & a weekend MASTER STUDIES pop-up!
Plus a peek in my sketchbook & what I've been up to 👀
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1 @ 7:00PM ET on YouTube & Twitch
I was looking back through the big list of theme ideas that people have submitted to see what this week’s should be. There are so many good ones, but three really stood out. I couldn’t decide (nor do I feel like it’s solely my decision!) so I put a little poll up on the discord channel to see what other’s thought:
And so it was decided that this week we will be doing Shetland Scotland - sheep, landscapes, knitting, etc!
I have already started gathering reference photos and let me tell you, this week is gonna be C O Z Y ! 🐑🧶👒✨
psst. it’s helpful if you turn on notifications for the livestream as it helps YT know that people are interested so they share it with more people!
✏️🤗💖✨
POP-UP! ART HANG PARTY!
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3 at 10am et on YouTube & Twitch
Theme: MASTER STUDIES!
We will be having a special weekend pop-up ART HANG PARTY! to allow our friends in other timezones who have to catch the replays to join us LIVE!
I’m really looking forward to this!
Do you have an idea for a future ART HANG PARTY! theme?
Follow and DM your doodles to @arthangparty on Instagram to be shared on stream! Tag @arthangparty to be featured in our stories!
Join the ART HANG PARTY! discord! https://discord.gg/XztzrCkQT5 🤗💖✨ A place to share your AHP drawings, theme ideas, inspirations, artworks, and for us to get to know each other better! 🥰
Watch past ART HANG PARTY! replays here
THIS WEEK IN MY SKETCHBOOK
MONDAY, JANUARY 22 ✨
I almost don’t even want to share this because, well look at it! But this is a safe space where I share all the art I make, so here we are. A semi-blind single-line self portrait. I bought myself a cheap little table-top mirror to use for self portraits, a la Sandi Hester, instead of working from a photo.
Let’s move on, shall we?
I got the first layer of the full background in on the daisy painting. I think I like it? I need to add a second layer and see how I feel about it.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 23 ✨
When I was looking back at my drawings from last week’s ART HANG PARTY! I thought the would make really cute editorial spot illustrations. Well, today I made that a reality!
I scanned my sketchbook pages into photoshop and cleaned them up a little. Then I dragged them into Illustrator and used my good friend image trace on them, adjusting the settings until it looked right. After a LOT of deleting of excess anchor points, I ended up with exactly what I had envisioned!
They look very similar to the original drawings, but better, more professional I think. Like proper illustrations!
Anyway, to further illustrate my point (hehe) here’s a funny little magazine I made this afternoon.
A note to art directors and magazine/website editors: HIRE ME!
I was flipping though my sketchbook as I was scanning the drawings above and came across a spread of yearbook photos of kids from the 1960’s from a past
session (Kids of Beaver High) and thought that would be a fun thing to do again, so I pulled up Pinterest and searched out some photos.I used my black Polychromos coloured pencil, teal Inktense pencil and a water brush over some swooshes of pastel watercolour. Fun!
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24 ✨
Do you ever have those moments when finish a painting or sketchbook spread and feel so meh about it that it kinda leaves you feeling down?
This was one of those.
I have this photo hanging by my bedside of my grandma’s freshly tilled garden. Just one row of yellow flowers remained. All the surrounding fields were also bare. You can see the little red schoolhouse that we would walk to and play at all the time. I thought, this will be nice to paint. And maybe it can be another piece in the ‘memories from my grandma’s garden’ collection.
After finishing the centres of the daisy painting a few days ago, I used up the leftover yellow paint on my palette to prep a sheet of cold pressed paper, so I decided to use that. My plan was to use gouache, but I didn’t want to use my dry palette so I pulled out all my tubes. I spontaneously decided to go with a limited red, blue, yellow, brown, white palette.
I was not planning on adding colour pencils or Neocolor II, but when I was done with the paint I felt it needed more.
Anyway, this is where I left it. Maybe I’ll take another pass at it? It still feels unfinished…
THURSDAY, JANUARY 25 ✨
It was DRAGON WEEK at ART HANG PARTY! Anecdotally, I think this might be the most excitement for a theme we’ve have yet! Who knew so many people loved dragons?
I was nervous. Dragons are not my comfort zone. But I thought if I treated it as an opportunity to play with my Kuretake Gansai Tambi paints, then I’ll have fun regardless of how my dragons turned out.
I was right! It was fun!
I managed to almost exactly match the colour palette for the week with the Kuretake paints!
FRIDAY, JANUARY 26 ✨
Ray was actually home on a Friday evening - a rarity between him working and DJing - so we decided to fire up the twitch-machine and have ART DISCO! That’s the one where he plays house music and paint or draw alongside him.
I didn’t want to do anything too involved so I decided to put another background layer on the daisy painting.
The blue I used for the first layer was too dark. It just wasn’t right. So I grabbed a little bowl and mixed up what I was hoping would be enough paint to do the job. I used a 1/3 - 2/3 mix of white and the cobalt blue, and then added a touch of fluorescent pink. Which turned out to be a slightly darker shade of the cornflower blue I used for petal shading - 👌
I feel much better about this painting now!
SATURDAY, JANUARY 27 ✨
After filming a little video for YT I wanted to have a little sketchbook time but I didn’t want to do anything super involved. I pulled up @thebotanica_collective IG account that
runs and looked through the collection of weekly reference photos and settled on two that I thought complemented each other nicely.For the greenhouse I used a white Neocolor I as a wax-resist, and then went in suuuuper loose with Kuretake paints. I love relaxed abstract-ish spreads like this!
SUNDAY, JANUARY 28 ✨
I pulled out my Neocolor IIs and took another pass at the garden piece from the other day.
I think I like it now!
VIDEO OF THE WEEK
I’ve had a few people ask me about how I have my iPad set up for drawing fast, like at ART HANG PARTY!, so I made a little video with some quick tips and settings updates, all basically geared at removing all the distractions that come with drawing digitally (at least for me).
I’d love to hear if you implement any of these things, or if you have any tips to add!
🤗💖✨
It’s still early afternoon on Sunday and I will no doubt do a bit more art before the day is done, but in the interest of checking an item off my no-pressure to-do list I thought I’d wrap this newsletter up and send it off now!
See you Thursday (and Saturday!!) at ART HANG PARTY!
Ways you can support me:
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🎟️ Do you like to draw? Join us for ART HANG PARTY!
So where do I start? :)
1- Shetland Scotland sounds an amazing theme for AHP, I want to draw it but I still need to catch up the cats sessions 🙈 some days out of home and now I have everything in delay mode! Anyways count me in for the Master Studies pop-up 😊
2- It was lovely to see your paintings from the references at The Botanica Collective 🌿 really gorgeous and they match perfectly! Feel free to join anytime you want 🥰 P.S.- I run this project with my artist friend Joana @joanadornellas 🤗 it's a parterniship!
3- Will see your new YT video now, I always feel overwhelmed with all the possibilities when drawing digitally so maybe you have good tips that I can use.
And looks like you had a nice week artwise, always so many drawings/paintings to show us 🤩 I'm always impressed! Wish you a nice week ahead Melissa 👋💛