Illustration Friday: Visitors

Just a bit of silliness for this week's Illustration Friday topic. Don't worry - they are friendly aliens!

A Japanese Landscape

Today I took part in a watercolour painting workshop in the Japanese garden at Lauriston Castle. The Japanese garden, which signifies friendship between Edinburgh and Kyoto, is about 5 years old.

The workshop started off indoors, looking at books on Japanese art and then painting some flowers. We then moved out to the garden, and the sun came out for one of the few occasions this summer! We painted in the Japanese garden for the rest of the morning and all afternoon, and I ended up with sunburn on my neck! It was lovely to meet up with a few ladies who I had met at the museum watercolour course earlier this year, and I met a lot of other people too. It was really interesting to see everyone's different interpretations of the garden.

Drawings from yesterday

Before I met up with my friends yesterday I did some drawing at the museum, and I also drew on the train on the way to Edinburgh (inspired by Gabi Campanario's commuter sketches). If you look carefully you will see the Forth Road Bridge through the train window.

I used a fine black Copic pen, a white Sharpie marker, and my new favourite: a grey Pitt brush pen. I added yellow coloured pencil to the butterfly when I got home. I plan to go back to the museum to do more animal sketches sometime, as animals are something I want to learn to draw better.

Street performers on the Royal Mile

I went to Edinburgh yesterday to surprise some of the friends I'd made at summer school. In the evening we ended up walking along the Royal Mile and came across these wonderful street performers. They juggled and did acrobatics and got a little boy from the audience to help them.

Friends from art college

One of the best things about my week at art college was all the great people I met. These are some of the other people who were on the illustration course: Miki, Kristian, Marie-Noelle and Maki. Below are Marie-Noelle and Maki with the fish we made from post-it notes at a collaborative art event. We decided that it was a Fugu fish (Japanese puffer fish).

Learning to draw people

I want to work on improving my people-drawing skills. I really envy those people who can, with a few strokes of the pen, create a realistic drawing of a person. These people are drawn from photos, and once I feel more comfortable with drawing people from photos I will move on to real live people. I'm quite happy with how these turned out, and pleased that I managed to draw them in pen without using pencil first.

Illustration Friday: Emergency

This is my first attempt at joining in with Illustration Friday, an illustration site where a topic is set each Friday. The topic this week is Emergency.

Sketching with friends

One of the great things about my week at art college was the chance to interact with other artists and to spend time together drawing. With my friends from the illustration course, Marie-Noelle and Maki, I spent time drawing in Princes Street Gardens, in the grounds of the art college, in the common room of our halls of residence, and at the Ivy Wu gallery in the museum.

Illustration for All

This is some of the work that I did on the illustration course. Above are illustrations for a little "poof book" (a book made by cutting and folding a single sheet of paper) and below are illustrations based on proverbs.

They were all made using collage. I hadn't really done much in the way of hand-cut lettering before, and I found it easy and effective so I will definitely be trying it again. I really liked the way that the muted grey colour scheme turned out in the images above, and I enjoyed making the watercolour background for the picture below, so these are also things I will try again.

Thank You, Andrea

A big thank you to the very talented Andrea Joseph, for sending me these fantastic purse drawings. It was great to have a parcel waiting for me when I got back from Edinburgh, and Andrea's drawings are even lovelier in real life than they are on her blog.

What I did in Edinburgh

Other than going to the summer school at Edinburgh College of Art, I went to see films, exhibitions and shows.

I went to the Dazzle jewellery exhibition at the Traverse Theatre. This was an exhibition I had visited often some years ago, but I had forgotten about it for the past few years and was glad to have rediscovered it. At the museum I saw the Picasso - Fired with Passion exhibition. This really showed his passion and creativity and it was good to see some of his work other than paintings. Also at the museum was an exhibition of work by Anna S King, who works with materials such as paper, fibre and string. At the Stills Gallery on Cockburn Street I saw John Stezaker's collages of old postcards and photographs.

At the City Art Centre I saw the Hand, Heart and Soul exhibition, about the Arts and Crafts movement in Scotland. I could have spent all day sketching there! I love Jessie M King's work, with all its intricate detail, and her drawings, when I saw some of them in Glasgow last summer, were what inspired me to start drawing in my Moleskine sketchbook using a very fine pen.

At the Cameo Cinema I saw Tales From Earthsea, La Vie en Rose and SherryBaby. I really enjoyed the first two but didn't enjoy SherryBaby quite so much.

With some of my art college friends I went to see a performance by a drummer from Switzerland, Christophe Fellay. He was absolutely amazing! We also went to the Forest Cafe where there was live music and comedy.

I saw a Chinese parade on Princes Street, dancers in Princes Street Gardens, and street performers on the Royal Mile. I also went to the West End Craft and Design Fair.

Looked around lots of interesting shops including Helios Fountain, Fabhatrix, Mr Wood's Fossils and TransReal.

I'm back from art college!

I'm back from my week-long illustration course at Edinburgh College of Art. I will post the pieces I did on the course later this week, because I stupidly left them at my parents' house this afternoon! Instead here are some pages from my sketchbook that I did in preparation for the finished artwork.

Let sleeping blogs lie

I'm going to be busy doing other things for the next week and a bit, including a week-long illustration class at art college, so I won't have time to blog. But I hope to have lots of new pictures to post when I have finished the course.

I got the "sleeping blog" idea from Casey Toussaint - hope it's OK that I've "borrowed" the idea! The drawing is of a sculpture by Ron Mueck.

Blue Heart

Today is the first day of my holidays. I went to Glasgow and visited Queen's Cross Church, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I pretty much had the place all to myself. I sat in one of the upstairs galleries and drew the impressive blue heart window.