Illustration Inspiration

I said I would use these lovely umbellifer trees on another drawing and here it is. I don't think the deer shows up as well as with the red version, but on the whole I prefer this one I think....although the red one is nice.

This is quite a humorous image in pen and ink with a couple of dabs of digital colour. I love drawing figures with birds on some part of their anatomy.

This was produced by cross hatching with Staedtler fibre tipped pens. I loved drawing this piece. It has a very organic shape and I love the colours. I will definitely do some more of these. Cross hatching has to be the most relaxing art technique there is.

You can see I have been going through my red and black phase this week. This is a semi abstract drawing of tree forms and can be read either way up. It is partly painted but I think it would look a lot nicer when coloured digitally which is something I will probably do next week. I like the graphic quality.

This is the red painted version of the stylised deer and the original copyright free artwork from my motif book.

The following images are the work of illustrator and writer Christina Balit. They are from the books "The Lion Bible" and "The Twelve Labours Of Hercules".

Well, the new computer seems to be working well. Unfortunately the old computer decided to crash its hard drive before I had completed the removal of all the files. Everything was backed up to one month ago but the drawings I have done in the past month were lost sadly. I have hard copies of them but no image file. Some of them were too time consuming and complex to repeat and there are always so many new things to draw and paint that I think I will just write off the loss and carry on. A lesson well learned. Always back up your work.

I was musing today about how much inspiration I gain from things around me. I just have to catch a glimpse of a combination of colours in a magazine or, often, a particular pattern on someone's skirt. I try and memorise it until I get home and can commit it to paper. I have never yet approached anyone and asked to take a photo of an item of their clothing although I have often wanted to. I am not too sure how it would be received. I was looking through a book I borrowed from the library today with a picture of a red deer leaping in a snowy woodland scene which had been painted on 1930's china, and that gave me the inspiration I needed to produce my deer in landscape images. The actual deer artwork is from my dearly loved motif book with copyright free images. I often use images from this book as the basis for my drawings and paintings. I have posted a picture of the bird and animal motif book but I would like to get the plant and flowers book in the same series.

My multicoloured leaves drawing was also inspired by a retro china plate. I did the leaf motifs too large to get many rows in. I may well do it again and make the motifs small so that I can get all the colours of the rainbow in the picture. That would be more me.

My featured artist this week is Christina Balit. She is an English author and illustrator, primarily of childrens' books. She has an enchanting and vividly colourful style which is part naive, part contemporary with a little bit of folk thrown into the mix. I love the way she renders her trees and the hair of her figures. She uses masses of colours but her artwork never looks overdone, although it is very decorative. She doesn't have a personal website and it is difficult to find any of her artwork that is not just book covers on Amazon etc. The best way to appreciate her work is to buy the books she has illustrated. I have two which I have shown in the post. Both are full of the most amazing illustrations even if you don't want to read the stories. Her illustrations which I have posted are all from these two books....so browse and enjoy.