The Sleeper's Den

In this house, we try not to let Professor’s Snape’s birthday pass without some new artwork, even if the artwork is often quicker and less accomplished than we would like.

Happy 61st birthday, Severus Snape!

(”Are you a bit obsessed with Snape’s flying skills, Sigune?” “What, why? Whatever gave you that idea?” *blushes*)

Oh! Important news: snapecase has just started!

I also need to post my Hoggywarty recs but nothing goes according to plan at the moment and I am behind on Practically Everything :/.

If you follow me on Facebook or Tumblr, you have already seen this, but if not: Gawain and Ragnell watercolour! With which I am actually happy! I hope there is more where that came from. I'm brooding on a cover for The Darkest Hour, incidentally, but I don't seem to be getting anywhere.

...Drawing this made me feel like getting an enormous, new box of colour pencils (this was drawn with various odds and ends - some of these pencils I have had since nursery school!). AND it reminded me just what a control freak I am. I suppose that may not go down well at art school ;-).

I enrolled, by the way. Classes will start in September. I'm already excited!

I had to try out my new watercolours, of course. They are Blockx - an excellent Belgian brand of which up until last week I had never even heard. I bought 25 colours at a 50 % discount because, alas, the art shop in my street that used to carry them is going to stop selling Blockx :(. My guess is that they are just too expensive and in times of crisis they don't sell easily :/. They are really good though - certainly on equal footing with my beloved Winsor & Newton.



So today you get Elves with Blockx :-). I am rereading Lord of the Rings (last time I read it I was 12 or 13) - all because of the_winterwitch. There is a possibility that I'll be painting some LotR art for her, so I thought I'd better reacquaint myself with the material. I am much enjoying the reading, I have to say, but from an art-y point of view I am experiencing a few ... well, maybe not problems, but LotR isn't working the same way for me that the Harry Potter series and A Song of Ice and Fire do.
( Read more... )

...I have such a back log of gift art that it's not funny :p. That's what I get for being bad at gift-giving: I offer pictures instead of purchases, but I have to get them all done! And I'm not always equally inspired, so sometimes it really takes time to create something I can offer without blushing.

In any case, here is one friend 'taken care of': bettyboop_comic. He introduced me to the manga Lone Wolf and Cub (well, to all manga really - and I distinctly remember him glowering at me when, being asked what sort of manga I wanted, I replied "one in which the characters have those large eyes!". He grudgingly steered me towards La Rose de Versailles and then nearly forced me to read Lone Wolf to make up for my faux-pas...). Here is my take on the Cub from the title: Daigoro. I just love Daigoro. Being a little boy, he is so much more human than his father! At the same time, he is a Baby Bushi. Poor thing.





Meanwhile, there is some great ficcing going on at hoggywartyxmas! I haven't read fic in a loooong time, but Hoggywarty is traditionally less ship-oriented than your average fest, which is always attractive for me. This year seems to be a particularly good one :). My personal faves so far:

The Incomplete Art of Cartography (G) by Anonymous - a wonderful, poetic, thoughtful story about three places that aren't on the Marauders' Map. Featuring Minerva McGonagall, Horace Slughorn and Remus Lupin - gen.

Humbug (PG-13) by Anonymous - Snape, hardly an expert gift-giver, has finally found the perfect gift for McGonagall. But somehow he has trouble getting it delivered. Includes Snape's close-reading of Dickens's Christmas Carol :D. Truly excellent, with a perfect Snape and delightful humour - gen.


My gift isn't up yet, but someone who wishes to stay Anonymous (though I'd recognise her art anywhere :D) has posted a lovely illustration to my (equally lovely) gift fic of last year, Reflections in Liquid by purplefluffycat. So I feel like I have been doubly 'gifted' :D.

On occasion, I feel the urge to do something a little more fanciful with my characters' costume. My imagination is really limited, I fear, so everyone in the comic walks around in the same cloak and tunic, the Britons in breeches and the Irish in, well, no breeches. But now and then I have an idea for something a little bit different. Here I gave Gawain one of those famous Irish shaggy cloaks - only, it's a bit unusual in its colouring. But it's technically possible, so why not? :P

( Shaggy Cloak )

No, I'm not on a major art spree with my broken limb; I'm finding it difficult to ink properly, so in fact not so much is going on art-wise. BUT this picture was painted a while ago, on the same day as my portrait of Lord Eddard in fact, as a birthday present for my BMF bettyboop_comic.

Little Bran Stark is one of my favourite characters in ASoIaF. He's one of the few child characters in the book who is actually childlike, though I guess that he, too, is rather mature for an eight-year-old. I'm not sure I like Bran's plot points, but I like the kind of little boy he is.



I'm particularly pleased with the colours in this one. I am awfully bad at mixing greys (I'm only slightly better at greys than blacks - the latter I don't manage at all), but that day the greys went swimmingly. Yippee! The texture of the paper (Daler-Rowney) did the rest...

( Summer Child )

This weekend I have only line art for you. The idea is to colour it, but since I spent the best part of today doing the inks, I find I haven't the time to finish it before the end of the weekend... It's not that this drawing is particularly complex, but it *is* time-consuming. Probably just because I am really slow -_-.

I pencilled Lord Ned and his Lady Cat last Monday, on my day off, and transferred the drawing to watercolour paper. Today, while doing the inks, I made quite a few small corrections, so here's to hoping the paper hasn't suffered too much, or my painting is doomed before I start :/.

( Ned and Cat )

Lokiiiiiiiii! My first attempt at the God of Mischief ;-). I slapped some quick Photoshop colours on my sketch.



- I forgot to post from DW this time around X/. I'm without Internet on my own computer at the moment; my cable is fine and my computer too, but somehow, no ethernet seems to be coming out of that little hole in the wall where my cable is attached :/. And I'm so used to posting at LJ that I just ... well, kind of forgot that I normally post from DW. Ah well. That's fixed now :-).

I'm just hoping I get my 'own' interwebs fixed soon, because life is hard without my favourites and without the possibility to post my images directly from my own computer -_-.

I'm continuing my attempts to find a workable style for my definitive comic pages. Sometimes I feel I'm still a long way away -_-.

I have a colleague with a background in art/graphic design/comics who takes an interest in what I'm doing, but I can tell he's less than impressed with my colour skills :/. He has advised me to:
a) draw on coloured paper so that some of my colour values are already there;
or
b) work in monochrome.
But to be honest, I can't see myself doing either of these. Much though I like the idea of drawing on coloured paper, it's going to be a time-consuming technique (and I'm dead slow as it is) which, on top of that, doesn't scan too well. And for the second option to be successful, I'd need to know a LOT more about light and shadow. I am as hopeless with those as I am with colour, so as far as I am concerned, trying to adopt that tactic would be of no help at all.

In short, I'm no further :/.



This picture (in a small watercolour Moleskine) seemed really nice to me when I had just finished it, but I'm no longer sure :p. It did remind me that I'm still more comfortable inking with Staedtler pens than with any other tool... Yay, back to the start D:...