Coloured doodles

Here's what I did with the doodles I showed you earlier this week. I filled them in with watercolour paints. But I've also scanned in the originals, so I can print them out to use with coloured pencils too!

Tuscany journal

Soon I will be heading off on holiday to Tuscany and the Italian Riviera! I've wanted to go to Tuscany ever since I saw the film A Room With a View when I was a teenager, and now I'm finally going!

Music - Michele Candotti - A Song for Italian Summer (via Jamendo)

For all the holidays I've taken on my own, I've used a Moleskine Japanese album, which is one huge long piece of card folded into a concertina of pages. As you can see from this post, I love to decorate the pages of my journals, but I don't always have a lot of time to do this when I'm on holiday, so I often decorate them appropriately before I go.

For my Italy trip, I decided to go for a long, continuous Tuscan landscape that extends over the whole of one side of the paper, with rolling hills and lots of little towns, houses, trees, etc.

First I sketched the landscape in pencil, then I went over the lines with a fine black pen, and erased the pencil marks. I filled in the hillsides with various shades of green and yellow watercolour, then painted the trees and rooftops. I added some lines in the cultivated fields. Finally I added shadows beside the trees and buildings. I added some lettering at the start of the journal, with where I'm going and the dates.

When I go on holiday, I will write in the area above the landscape, and on the back of the paper I will stick any little mementos.

#DIYCreativeClub challenge

Last month I took part in the #DIYCreativeClub challenge on Instagram organised by Cassy Fry. There was a prompt for each day of the month, and you could interpret it in any way you chose. Since I was working my way through Sachiko Umoto's book, Let's Draw Happy People, I decided to do some drawings.

I found an unused sketchbook I'd originally bought for one of my art college courses. I discovered that, if I fitted two drawings on each page, the book was almost big enough for all the month's drawings. In advance I drew all the square outlines and wrote underneath each what the day's prompt was.

It was great fun checking in each day and seeing how other people had creatively interpreted the prompts.

The Glasgow School of Art fire

I was really sad to hear about the fire at Glasgow School of Art, (this is what has inspired my month of posts on the theme of Charles Rennie Mackintosh) and I went to Glasgow just over a week later to see the damage for myself. I'd been planning to draw the building in one of my Moleskine notebooks, but by mistake I took one that was already full up! Luckily I found a blank index card in the back pocket, so I was able to draw on this instead. It was a beautiful day and I was able to sit on a shady bench at the new building across the road. I also took lots of photos, and chatted to a lady who had been about on the day of the fire.

I'm really pleased that so much of the building was saved, and that lots of work will be put in to try to recreate the damaged parts. I'm also really impressed by the positive attitudes of the students I saw on the news recently whose work was damaged or destroyed.

Summer School

I've just spent a week at an Illustration summer school at Edinburgh College of Art. Our project for the week was to produce a book with 6 pages of illustrations on the theme of Journeys. We spent a lot of time developing our ideas, and our tutor Mina Braun gave good advice on how we might improve our work. By the end of the week I had produced some illustrations that I was really pleased with, and learned some new techniques like mono-printing and using a dip pen (I loved this so much that I have bought quite a few colours of ink to try out).

The people on the course were really friendly, and it all seemed to be over so quickly! I was really exhausted by the end of the week (especially after doing the mono-printing).

The book that I made was based on a young-adult novel called Little Sister by Kara Dalkey. It is based on various aspects of Japanese mythology, and tells the story of a girl going in search of her sister's lost soul.
More photos

Birdie paintings

When I got my blue birdies, I knew I had to paint them! For a long time I have admired the paintings of Carol Gillott, and the blue birdies reminded me of some of her watercolours - wish my paintings were half as good as hers, though! I've started a new large watercolour Moleskine with these paintings, and I may fill the whole thing with paintings of the birds from different angles!

Sort of a self portrait

I didn't really mean to draw a self portrait - I was just doodling while sitting in front of a mirror and came up with this.

Ain't no cure for love

I started this when we were waiting for the Leonard Cohen concert to begin, added the figures during the interval, then finished it off at home. The lyrics in the drawing are from one of my favourite songs.

Old art - Lochmaben

I'm tidying up my portfolio (which contains mostly art from the last few years) and decided to also tidy up my art folder, which is full of my older drawings and paintings. I came across more than ten pictures of the same place, Lochmaben, where we went on caravan holidays during my teenage years. I also have numerous sketchbook pages full of drawings of swans, coots, cormorants, and people in rowing boats, all drawn at Lochmaben.

More pages in my Japan sketchbook

I finally got round to adding some more pages to my sketchbook all about Japanese culture. Each of these pages takes about a day's research! I'm not sure whether I will add some colour to the ones that are just drawn with ink - I quite like them the way they are.

Garden ideas

I was trying to decide what I could do to improve my garden, so I began by drawing a plan of the garden. This was not easy, as it was mostly done while standing on the lid of my toilet and peering out the small window in the bathroom! When I drew and coloured in the plan I decided that my garden actually looked better than I had originally thought, but I still wanted to break up some of the straight lines. So below is one of my ideas for what I can do. I also want to fit a flowering cherry tree or plum tree in somewhere.

Sketches of Chengde

These are the only drawings that I had time to do on holiday in China.

Shoes

Lots of shoes!

Decorated envelope

I always enjoy adding a bit of decoration to my envelopes, but this is the most complex that I have ever done. This was for someone I met when I went to Japan, and I’d done a little doodle of a kokeshi doll for him before so I thought this would be an appropriate design.

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.

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.