Custom artworks from Morag Hickman – Ideas given form
Portrait of a noble and distinguished pupper: Biggles the Destroyer. This photograph was an absolute delight to work from.
India ink with a dip-pen over a pencil sketch on bristol board, then coloured using Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolours, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
A really fun (if slightly infuriating) commission – to create an artwork featuring two wonderfully deranged pirates in full (and I mean full) costume. Seriously, I think they’ve got at least two guns and three blades each, not to mention all the straps, strings, parrots, hats, buttons, compasses, buckles and so on… Based on a photograph and taking style hints from a Deadpool poster, this is made with india ink and watercolours on bristol board. Also there’s a hint of metallic sparkle where appropriate.
This was a bit of a departure for me, and I only had a tiny brush which made making smooth washes for the sky impossible, but I’m still very pleased with the results.
It’s all quiet here at Entanglement Towers, so until the other side of the festive food-coma, here’s a little festive greetings card.
A scan of the stag in the mist, and a new painting of a lotus flower. Christmas gifts… Sod’s law I figured out background shading half-way through the lotus flower!
Christmas gift – a small watercolour of a stag in the mist.
After this morning’s highly successful coot-and-chick painting, I felt on a roll and decided to go do something a bit more abstract and from-my-head. Unfortunately, this ended up a lot more time-consuming than I had anticipated. I painted from lunch ’till 10pm, with only breaks for sustenance and phonecalls, and I didn’t manage to finish it…
Here are the fruits of my labours thus far: a dip-pen inked tree, with watercolours. Still to be added: a sunset sky.
Learning points:
That in itself was worth learning though, so I guess that made it all worthwhile. I’m going to go and crash now, you can probably tell from my inarticulateness that 8+ straight hours of concentrated painting has scrambled my brains.
This tree painting (when completed), this morning’s sweet picture of watchful parent and fuzzy chick, and my brush-wielding services are also for sale – contact me for details.
Here I had fun with a photo of a coot and baby in Lake Geneva that I took a couple of years ago.
I’m very happy with the feather textures, watery shadows and ripply texture, but I’m getting increasingly frustrated with my scanner’s tendency to murder my watercolours. I’ve included some photos for comparison – the most delicate details are obscured. I don’t think I’ll be able to make prints from my watercolours until I can figure out how to capture them more effectively.
I’m so glad I took the time to make a new bracket for my drawing surface – thermoplastic split pins and wooden battens mean it’s a lot easier to prop on papers of various sizes for painting. They’re very unobtrusive, so I don’t bang my arm on them, and secure yet easy to move.
Not entirely happy with the background (hence the crops), but I do love playing watercolour.
Based on an image from the Radnor Bird Blog, found via a Google image search.
Watercolour study of Fuchsia Genii from the garden. Unfortunately my scanner murders the colours and subtlety, oh well!
