When In Doubt, Adobe

Ever since I started this blog a whole 6 weeks ago, I've taken to scanning every s*crap of paper I draw on - just in case I find some use for it. Like those days when I can't bring myself out of the fog to do something creative (did everyone answer Neda's question yet? I'm still thinking about that one).

I'm still discovering this miraculous tool for illustrators and others called Adobe Photoshop. I still haven't peeled off more than a few tiny corners from this huge treasure map of techniques, but here's one (awful but useful) drawing I've been using to experiment with different effects. So far, this is what I've come up with - yes, yes, I know, it's very ugly, but think of the infinite possibilities with this really cool tool.

I started with watercolour and dry pencils and ink on heavily textured watercolour paper (first mistake), then couldn't figure out what to do with the background and ended up with a mess. Then I used the smudge, image attribute change, texture and extracting tool thingies on Photoshop to see what would happen. Here are the 4 versions I've come up with so far (the blue is the original, the rest are Adobed).

Moi, Plein-Air?

Yesterday was the very first day of spring here. Late according to my calendar, but the temperature finally hit above 20˚C and hubby insisted on dragging the lot of us to a nearby nature preserve. Not that we minded really, the girls were ready for an outdoorsy kind of day, especially with the prospect of bird-watching, snake ferreting (ha! like that was ever going to happen with me around) and most importantly - plein-air painting, hubby's obsess... favourite pastime.

So here we were at the end of the afternoon, baking in the blinding light at the park, when I found myself with no option but to join everyone else in, gasp... painting outdoors. Unlike the rest of my brood, furiously engaged in this captivating activity, I found nothing inspiring in the still-denuded, dusty brown landscape around us - until my heart melted at the site of these two lovely creatures totally engrossed in creating their masterpieces.

Of course, I only had about 45 seconds for each sketch before I had to answer calls for "more water, please, can I have some juice? where's my sandwich, mommy? when do we go to the other park? I'm done, I'm hot, oww there's a buuuugggg on my paaaapeeerrr"...

Sketch in the afternoon

(Hubby sent me this from his sketchbook)
Geoff and Rudayna's house is a very colourful place. Lots of interesting elements meet you at every angle you turn.
On a cold February day while the kids were playing and everyone else was working hard to make lunch, I snuck away to the couch and spent a few minutes doing a quick sketch with pen and ink. I didn't have my favourite Ackerman pen at hand, but used a plain Pilot Fineliner that I had handy. Back home I added colours (as I remembered them) and diluted the pen lines with water as well.

(R&G - F. Barrage © 2007)

In reality, the red wall is a much richer red almost tomato coloured and lovely. It would have tipped the balance of the drawing though, so I made it paler.