Winter is coming...

As much as I hate to admit it, winter is not only coming, but actually here.  :S  I used to love this time of the year, with all of it's snow and gift giving and outpouring of general love and awesomeness, something happened at some point in my life that has turned me against it. 

I'm not even sure why, but now I have such a hard time with the winter months.  My body doesn't seem to like it anymore either.  My hands get very dry and achey, I'm always tired and I pretty much as frozen solid the entire time.

But I keep trying to remember that this is a good time of the year and that I have lots and lots of stuff to be thankful for.  I'm trying to stay inspired and it seems so far that lots of color and painting anything I can get my hands on helps.  ;)  Here's a page from my art journal and a little daily post it doodle to try to stay creative so far. 

And a little digital something since it's been a month that I've shared anything digitally related. :O  Hope you enjoy! :D

Bunny, fishee, ellie

Pulled this guy off of one of my sketch pages. You can read more details about it on my da page.

I pulled this guy off of an old sketch page, too. Ended up changing his eyes, which seemed to suit him a bit better to me.

I had the urge to try painting like this.

Since my laptop skews colors, I tried to brighten it to make it not so dark and it came out more neon then I'd planned. But I was actually really pleased with this style of coloring. It seemed to work really well for me. It also allowed me to give the piece the illusion of having lines, without actually having them, which I liked. Definitely plan to keep trying this painting style. I changed it up a bit from the original tutorial, but it's more or less the same idea. Just blending and smoothing colors until they look right. With the bold color of this one, it reminds me very much of Lisa Frank, which I have always had a love for. ;D

The juggler

I guess it's Monday again, so back to juggling everything for the week. ;) Hope everyone had a nice weekend! <3

WooHoo! Snow Day!

We had a MAJOR snow storm this weekend, leaving at least 6 or 7 inches (or more!) at our feet. So what does that mean in regards to my artwork? I didn't do it! :D I played in the snow instead. Hey, it was a snow day after all. And once you're out of school, those come far and few between. :) I don't have any snow day pictures to share as the ones I took were fairly boring (since I couldn't take too many pictures with my gloves on) but I do have a few new pieces of art to show you that I created last week. This one started out as just a scrap piece of paper used while figuring out my watercolors, but somehow it turned into a fish.

My mom found me a watercolor dvd that I have been watching and trying to learn from, so to use the terms I have learned so far, I believe this is a wet on dry piece. I really like the wet on wet technique, since it produces the sort of image that I have shown below. (On which I also like to use salt, as you can see by all the white dots.)

I think I'm going to try and make some sort of picture out of this on Adobe, but I haven't decided yet. I'll have to play around with it and see what I can come up with. Also, if you're trying this technique out, be sure not to use too much water, as it will run and crinkle your paper if you're using fairly thin paper. I believe mine here was 90lb., so you may want to get something a bit heavier to start out with.

Libby the loopy Lobster

Here's Libby the loopy Lobster! She gets a bit sea sick sometimes. :)

A little crabby...

When you're sick, it's easy to let the sickness take over so that little things, no matter what they are, will get on your nerves and make you feel worse, so that when someone asks you something, you angrily snap back at them. Essentially, being sick can make us a little...well, crabby. And since I've been sick this week, I know I've been a bit crabby to everyone, although I do try to apologize if I am. Still, I thought I would post this cute little crabby I made with my tablet so that even though we can all be a bit crabby at times, we can also be nice little crabs as well. :)