1 drawing down, another half finished, just another 33 1/2 left.

Yup, I've managed to finish one of my drawings, probably one of the most experimental of the lot and am starting to get in the mood for experimenting with the others, rather than just doing a straight up drawing/sketch onto the paper.

So here's a picture of the first illustration I've managed to finish out of the 35 I set myself.

 

My chosen theme for the Sketchbook Project was 'Travel With Me' so I decided to do a colour map of a fictional country with the journey of the characters marked on in red. I plan to stick this to one page and print out a bit of jargon to about it to stick the facing page. Thankfully I've chosen to hand bind my Sketchbook once I've decorated the front and that should give me some room for sticking a load of stuff in. The map itself was first sketched onto a full A4 page and then coloured lightly with pencil crayon. Then I soaked it for a couple of minutes in warm tea before sprinkling instant coffee granules on it to give a more gradiated look. Once that was done I left it to dry slightly and then dabbed it with the teabags before shoving it under the grill on a low heat to finish it drying. Once that was all dry I got my watercolour palette, a small little white box, and started lightly painting in some of the detail. The place names and the journey route I inked in with a pen.

This is another illustration I'm working on. I figured I'd show some of the dangers of travel, in this case, getting stuck on a desert island. I think I'd been watching Castaway with Tom Hanks and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl which is why I've gone for palm trees. It's drawn in soluble pencil crayon over a very very light pencil sketch and once the whole thing's done I'm going to run a paintbrush over it lightly and then cut it out and stick it in. I did originally draw this straight into the book but couldn't remember if I'd used normal crayons or water soluble ones. I figured I'd just start again on a new sheet.

 So I thought I'd include this picture to show my creative workspace. I've got the majority of my art books, sketchbooks and the more frequently used notepads in the shelves and my journal by my bed, that's the little blue/green book close to the left hand side. You can, if you look closely, make out all the Terry Brooks books I've amassed, as well all my work for the Sketchbook Project. I'm going to have to pick up some PVA glue and tissue paper for some of my drawings for that but hopefully that won't be too hard to store, even in my little room.


In other news, I've gotten really into bookbinding. I've managed to bind one book so far, a rough paper one that's just going to be used to sketch out designs for my webcomic pages, nothing fancy. I've managed to create a whole list of book types that I want to bind though which is just a little odd, even for me. There's some that can wait but there's one definate idea that I want to have bound by the end of the year. I'll expand on that in another post soon once I've worked out a few details, along with any other book binding attempts I make.

In the meantime keep an eye on this month's to-do list to the right of the maind body of the blog. You'll be able to see the targets I set for myself this month and how I'm getting on with them.