sigune | Thank you! <3 (Reply)

mandrill and Anonymous sent me Valentines on LJ :D. Thank you very much!

If I'm a bit late with my thank-yous, it is because I wanted to accompany them with a picture, which means I had to find the time to draw one first :P. And I have always been painfully slow at that (*sigh*). But anyway - here is Lady Ragnell in her more alluring form, especially for you three.

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I'm sure no one will notice in the slightest, but in this picture I'm using a brand new red. It won't surprise anyone that I adore red, but the trouble is that as far as lightfastness goes, red seems to be one of the colours that comes off worst :( (as well as blue, my other favourite - ARGH!). Cadmium red does pretty well, but it's brick red and not transparent. My favourite is Alizarin Crimson, which happens to be pretty fast-fading. Winsor Red and Winsor Red Deep are supposed to be a bit more permanent (though still not lightfast, alas), so I have bought a half-pan of one and a tube of the other to see how they work out when it comes to mixing. For Ragnell's skin tone, Winsor Red certainly turned out satisfactory - it's a nice, warm red.

I haven't drawn anything for a while (apart from some pencil doodles on print at work, ahem), so I need to get my hand back in. I have returned to my pocket watercolour Moleskine which, I am sad to say, contains mostly rubbish, whereas real artists somehow seem to manage to make even their sketches and attempts worth looking at :/. So I'm determined to fill up the last remaining pages of my pocket sketchbook with stuff that is at least a little bit better-looking than the stuff that's in it so far.

I know that if you want to be a better artist, it won't do to take breaks from art, but seriously, there are so many things I like to do and I can't do them all at once. If I want to be a better seamstress I shouldn't be taking breaks from sewing, and if I want to get better at web design I shouldn't take breaks from webdesign, and if I want to get better at painting dolls, I should take breaks from that either. What a tragedy: I end up being a little bit good at several things, but not really good at anything.

As far as the comic is concerned, something is stirring at last. I can't put a date on it, but it will come back, like it always does. Arthur is getting more concrete, but he's not quite there yet, and it's actually quite tempting to continue with Morgana and Gawain who are pretty well-defined - but I'm afraid that if I go out of Arthur's way out of laziness, I'll never have the courage to go back later. So I guess that I'm waiting for Arthur to be more fun and less of a chore :P.