Coffee In Hand….

I’ve been working on some doodles for my doodle directory series.  Since the squares are small, it was a good size to try a stacking coffee cup illustration.



Grabbed my 8 x 8 square watercolor pad….and proceeded to draw the cups on a larger scale.



Since, I’m not very practiced in drawing inanimate objects…. I had to believe in myself!



Then I tried to bring in a paisley-bandana look to the cups.



For the art journal page, I thought I’d illustrate the journaling on a picture behind the cups.



Buffed up the letters…..



Then filled the lettering in…..Came across this saying a few years ago and I liked it!!!

Portable Project in Paisley

I’ve been enjoying my Sunglass Series where I can color pencil the people and marker doodle on something they are wearing. When I spotted this woman wearing her hat I thought I’d draw her next.  That wonderful hat gave me a lot of space for doodling.



I wasn’t sure how I wanted to approach this.  At first I thought of doing black and white doodles in the hat with the hat-band and the suit in color.



But then I changed my mind.



I didn’t want the band to compete with the hat, so black/white stripes worked well.



Since the underside of the hat doesn’t get as much light, I applied a light brown-gray in watercolor.



This skin took more time than I thought it should, but there are a lot of little variations to the colors thru the neck and the bust that I didn’t realize until I tried to sketch it.

If I would use smooth paper then we wouldn’t see all that grain coming thru the colored pencil portions.  But I like watercolor paper cuz it’s thick and can take all kinds of abuse!

Paisley Inspiration

Since I was travelling last week….I needed a small…portable project.  Stenciled and doodled up a page in my 5x8 watercolor moleskine for the trip.



After I colored that puppy in….I realized what I really want to do…is….make something like this on a grander scale…you know like “wallpaper scale”. So, I hit Dick Blick for their biggest moleskine (16.5 x 12) at their Black Friday sale.



Went to spoonflower.com to see if they stated the repeat dimensions for a roll of wallpaper.  What was I thinking???? No one has a standard repeat dimension that I could find all over google-land!  What is the big secret?  Well….as I thought about it…spoonflower gives me the dimensions for their rolls….and they give me an example dimension for the art to be placed and repeated on that roll.  But it’s totally up to me as to how I want to create/ repeat this pattern or any variation thereof.  Yikes!! Too much control!!  Just tell me what to do and I can do it….. i think!



So here’s page 1 (12” x 8”) the start of a wallpaper paisley pattern.  With me getting total free-reign!  Oh Boy!