Skull

 

Skull sketch! :)

Dumbledore's Army

Woodburning, 8.75″ by 6.5″, beech.  I did this years ago and never got around to sharing it because I wasn't sure it was finished; but now seemed like a good time to dust it off and pull it out and share it.  Maybe its time for Dumbledore's Army to rise again!

Some More Artwork

 Some more artwork I've been working on lately.

Wombat Sketch

Wombat reference here.  I'm not even doing Inktober this year, someday I'll do it and it'll be spectacular but right now its just too much work.

Crosshatching Shelf Fungus

 Sketch of shelf fungus based on this stock photo here.

Floating Island - Watercolor Pencils

 

Watercolor pencils are great, they're so convenient and I like that they leave a texture.

Update:

And here's two more in black and white and sepia.  Just trying things out and experimenting :)

Boy Chillin on a Floating Island

 

I just finished coloring this one, and I'm happy with it.  The child is based on this stock image

More Pages For Crumbling Overgrown Ruins

 You can see all the pages so far on my tumblr here.

Kelp Mermaid

This one took me a while, beautiful though isn't it?
 

 Here is a drawing I did of St. Junipero Serra! Its based on an image from Wikipedia as shown here:

 

Image Source

I wanted to draw it for several reasons, firstly because it was one of the statues torn down by the black lives matter movement last year sometime and I like the idea of trying at least in some small way to replace and even build on what was lost. 

And second it gave me an opportunity to practice my crosshatching which is great because a lot of the stories that continue to inspire me, like the Narnia books and Alice in Wonderland incorporate a lot of hatching and crosshatching in their illustrations.

And thirdly I really like the idea of drawing Catholic saints and religious art in general because I’m a Catholic and because there’s so much in it that’s beautiful.

So yeah, that’s three birds with one stone!  I always like having multiple reasons for working on the same artwork especially since I usually end up spending a lot of time on whatever it is I’m working on.

Three Snakes

 I did another Celtic Knot!  This one is loosely inspired by an M. C. Escher woodcut, (shown below), which happened to be the last design he did before he died.

 

I get all that from a big book of M. C. Escher’s artwork I’ve got called Impossible Worlds: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/998629.Impossible_Worlds

You can see that I didn’t finish my work to quite as many iterations of infinity as Escher, and it doesn’t have quite the level of craftsmanship, but still I’m always pretty happy when I finish another knot!

Guy With A Twig

 

The great thing about being a fairy or borrower or wee folk or whatever is that you can be walking along and a lot of things can be fairly similar, like moss looks a lot like grass and rocks are basically boulders but then you come to things like this, where there's a giant twig or a leaf like a crumpled up tent, or a giant acorn, or a pine needle or two and that part is all very different.  Its something I find fascinating.

Artwork 2020, Year In Review

 

 

 

 

I made a slideshow of all the artwork I did in 2020 in chronological order. :)

Artist Loadout

 Art takes decades to develop even at the best of times but sometimes it is all brought short by a disaster.

My room is a mess of course, I have artistic and literary projects strewn all over the place and I like it that way.  But lately I've been asking myself, what would I take with me if I had to leave in a hurry, like if I had to quit the country and my house might get destroyed.  Family?  Food?  Ammo?  That doesn't leave a lot of room for artwork and decades of toil would go up in flames.

Which leads to the hypothetical question that I have been asking myself and perhaps you should too:

What if all you had room for in your pack was a stack of paper, a book, a sketchbook, some pencils, and a few flash drives?  Would you ditch the sketchbook and pencils and bring more paper?  another couple books?  Smaller books?  Something else?  I don't even know what I'd do, but its something to think about.

Don't share your answers here.  We don't need the government to know.  But someones got to ask the important art questions, especially in an age where many hypothetical cases are not as hypothetical as we should hope.

The Color Version

Like I said, the color version.  I think I'll keep working on these for a while.