Tiny Doodle: "Blue Bell Bottoms"

As you can tell, I've been obsessed with tiny flowers lately. For this doodle, I used blue bell blossoms from our garden and a 0.38 Muji pen for the thin line. I bought a bunch of Muji pens when Jeff and I were in London and I love them! I need to get more of the 0.38 black pens, but haven't been able to find them in Canada yet. Did find them in the U.S. store, but am leery of the shipping charges and customs fees. :-(

I love creating found object doodles and post them on Instagram, "Found Object Art" gallery on Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr  and in my Found Object Art portfolio.

Morning moustache doodle in ink and lily-of-the-valley

Working with lily-of-the-valley blooms is a challenge, I'm finding! For one thing, they're so tiny that I keep accidentally squishing them. Another challenge is that they kept rolling around on the paper. I solved this by using a teensy bit of rubber cement to hold the bloom in place long enough to take a photo. I also need to get tweezers to work with smaller and more delicate objects.

Talking about revamping the look for Judy Blume classics in a Sharp-Schu Trifecta

I'm delighted to be a guest in today's Sharp-Schu Trifecta. Thanks to Colby Sharp and John Schu for the invite!

Poodle Doodle

I think the blue blossoms are some kind of bluebells. They and the dandelion came from our garden. I used a Muji 0.38 pen for the line.

I love creating found object doodles and post them on Instagram, "Found Object Art" gallery on Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr  and in my Found Object Art portfolio.

Experimenting with mixed media

Tried experimenting with mixed media this afternoon, after I did some book project work. Here's how I created the image above, in about an hour:

- Did the ink drawing first, no color, on ordinary sketchbook paper.

- Went out into the garden and picked a bunch of stuff. 

- Tried adding the stuff to the sketch outdoors, but the wind kept blowing it off. :-(

- Arranged stuff indoors.

- Took a photo.

- Imported the photo to Photoshop. Cleaned up gritty bits.

- Added colour on separate layers using the Multiply method. Not totally crazy about this technique, though, because it means having to mask out the vegetation bits. I was too lazy to do this, so I tried to Magic Wand out the white bits instead. But again, I was too lazy to do this carefully, which is why you'll notice odd shadows and discolorations here and there.

Conclusion: This wouldn't be a technique I'd want to use for an entire picture book project, but it'd be fun to play around with if I can figure out a better way to add colour. I might try real-life watercolor next time.