Friday, November 4, 2011

Imaginary Animals (1)


My first entry in this month´s Sketchbook Challenge theme: Imaginary Animals. India ink, watercolour, and my 6 year old´s sparkly pens...

My husband gets automated text messages from the railway service about late trains etc, and sometimes we lie in bed before the alarm goes off, hearing a series of beep-beep-beeps, and knowing: Ah, the trains are very late, probably for reasons which are so-very-much-not-fixable in the standard 15 minutes of the ¨This train will be 15 minutes late for operational reasons¨ excuse. Anyway, above is one of the many scenarios which I have thought in my mind, as to why the morning trains may in fact be running late: An Imaginary Animal!


I´ve been working through Nita Leland´s book Exploring Color, and I tried to make the animal´s gray by mixing opposite colours. It didn´t quite work out the way I thought! A bit greener than the light gray I had in my head, but still, I think it turned out a more interesting colour than if I had just chosen ¨gray¨ from the paintbox. It does take quite a lot of courage to put green on the paper, and then red, when you really want gray!

Here is the preliminary pencil drawing sketch. It is actually rather liberating to draw something that has no constraints of looking like a real animal.



A gratuitous picture of a beach near Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand.

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