Winter is over! Let the Spring Sale begin!

I'm calling it- The winter is officially over and it's time for a spring yard sale!
I have to thank all my New England friends on Facebook for giving me the ideas in this artwork. Since I live in dry and snowless Southern California  I have no idea what it's like to live through a winter like they've just had.
I kept changing the house in the background. Somehow it just never looked right in the sketch. But I think if I went with the original house it would have been just fine. This is an example of how I can obsess over things.

Here's a sketch of the Spring Sale artwork

Morning warm up for February 9- Pig on the Run

I'm trying to start doing a daily warm up piece of art although I don't want to put too much pressure on myself because I want the drawings to be spontaneous and fun and not be a chore.
This one let me experiment around with Painter 2015's brushes and digital watercolors. I increased the texture of the paper so the watercolors would show a watercolor paper type texture.
I love the look of the line quality here. Very spontaneous and loose, just like I like it.

Oh for heavens sake! I haven't posted since March?! Well, I have been busy on a few paying projects I guess  that's somewhat of an excuse.
I've been playing around with the new Corel Painter 2015 and trying out some new techniques. Painter is always fun to play around with and you can discover some really wonderful new things if you just sit down with it and think "I wonder what this does?'.
These drawing are for Inktober where artists try to do an ink drawing every day and post it on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. I don't have time to do one every day so I thought I do a little play on words with  Inktober.
I was experimenting here with using just one or two colors besides the black line and I really like how this came out.
People keep asking me if this is a story and I have to tell them no, not yet anyway but as I do more drawings a character and a story seems to be developing.

These two drawings have to do with the weather that's going on across the country at the time. Cold and snowy in the middle and eastern parts of the U.S. and dry drought conditions here in southern California.
I had a good time making these using the pastels, inks and croquil pen tools in Painter and doing a lot of experimenting. In the background of the drought art it was fun to make cacti in agony.
There is something about a limited palette that makes your brain work differently and I kind of like it. I think one of these may end up on a postcard mailer in the future.

Seriously, I used to do this to my poor cat and drove it half mad. Drove my mom totally insane and she use to rush into the room yelling at me to stop making all that racket.
I'm trying something new here style wise. I love the line quality of Edward Gorey and David Small and I was trying to be inspired by them and incorporate that wonderful line into my own style.
The palette I'm using only has 25 colors and 10 of those are greens so it's really interesting trying get the colors I want but in a way it's also freeing to be so limited in a way and it requires more creativity on my part to color a scene.
And so the experimenting continues....

First Love First Rejection.

Well, back to the blogging thing I guess. It's been way too long since I've posted anything on my blog and I swear I will try to more consistent in my updates from now on.
This artwork was created for my self promotional postcard and tells the story of a boy...OK, it was me in the fifth grade,  the schoolyard artist who created the most fabulous love letter in the history of the world and presented it to Celeste, the prettiest girl in school only to have her crumple it up and throw it on the ground right in front of everybody!
She and her friends spent the rest of the semester "A.T.W." as she called it, which stood for Avoiding The Weirdo- which was me of course.
So obviously the second picture of Celeste going back later and picking it up never happened.
But we weirdo artists always create our own reality don't we?

Power Out- No Computer ARRRGGGHHHH!

Had a two hour scheduled power outage today in our neighborhood so the power company could fix a transformer or something. I use the computer exclusively to do my art so I was out of business.
Unfortunately it stretched into a 4 1/2 hour power outage so I had to do some sketching for my new postcard with a pen...on paper....in a sketchbook. Oh the HORROR!!!