I’ve been pretty busy lately so I haven’t had a chance to get back into my anatomy drawing but in the meantime I’ve been making cards for my sister and mum whose birthday are within a week of each other! I wanted to make each card about items they really like ^_^.
The first one was a cute Pikachu card for my sister who is a huge Pokemon fan. I wanted to challenge myself to try my pattern style within a custom shape like Pikachu’s body. I found a picture and printed it out before I started to draw out the pattern. Once I worked that out I got some cooking paper, traced him in and coloured the back with a 6B pencil before retracing it to the special paper I use for cards.
This is where things started to go wrong. The transfer went fine and I started to ink the outlines around the body. I suddenly realised “Crap! If I want to use watercolour I need to do the colours first”. So I stopped the outlining, got out my watercolour pencils and began to fill into the shapes. The problem with that was the 6B pencil (being very soft and easily smudged) started mixing with colours. I thought that I should rub out some of the 6B tracing so there was less on the paper and it wouldn’t mix. However when I did, it smudged EVERYWHERE :(. It was at this point where I was starting to lose hope that the card would turn out. I had to do a second transfer of the pattern, but the first few times it didn’t align and I had to redo it again which really started to test my patience.
I gave up on using watercolour, knowing it would just end up with a grubby grey look, and decided it would be easier to just shade the card with normal coloured pencils. I think I ended up going over the pattern again as well, as the black wasn’t standing out. Lots of lessons learned from making this card (and a lot of anger vented)!
The card didn’t turn out too bad, but next time I will spend more time planning it out, not use 6B and work on getting those colours to really pop off the paper.
The other little card I made was for my mum based off Clarice Cliff ceramic pottery. I didn’t want to do my pattern style on this one because I believe it would’ve ruined the look, which has a very distinctive hand-painted style. I found a cute teapot to base it off. I was going pretty well with the design until I realised the I had done it the wrong way around (opening up on the left hand size, not the right) ^^;;. Despite the hiccup, I think it came out pretty well and was close the original design.
Overall I’m pretty happy that they at least look like what they were based off. Both my mum and sister liked their cards, which I think is the most important thing and I learned a lot from making them!
