Brush Pens - Tumblr Posts

Rough Sketch of Zartan’s Cat

Meet Ozzy, Zartan’s rough, semi-feral cat. This original feline character has been causing chaos in my head for a while now, and it was a lot of fun finally putting him on paper in some form. And it always helps to have a visual representation while writing!

I drew Ozzy with brush pens and a white Jellyroll pen for added details. I had initially pictured him as primarily black in color, and hoped to capture all the shades from both a reference photo and one of my furry nephews’ fur. Ozzy had other ideas, though, and turned out slightly more brown than anticipated, but I like it. (Also tried to capture the white fur on the scar, but it didn’t quite turn out how I’d hoped. I would do it differently next time.)

In any case, drawing this rebellious scruff-ball was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to writing about him and Zartan.

David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker and... Keane?

These sprang out of a brief conversation with somebody who involuntarily imagines singing animals whenever they hear music. They were embarrassed about it, but I thought the notion of Jarvis Cocker as a guinea pig in a leather jacket was something that needed to be put on paper.

Also, turns out I have no idea what Keane look like, I was imagining whiney-looking anaemic teenagers with floppy hair and a body type that suggested childhood Rickets.  I had to be rescued by google images.

These are a set of robots I designed as a birthday present for my friend Nam, shamefully about 6 months late. The top two are me and Nam, the little ones are AngstBot, HugBot and DanceBot. I'm on a bit of a robot kick lately, I never even tried to draw them before. They're a lot of fun as it turns out.

As I've been so quiet this month I thought you'd like to see something. This is a Christmas card I designed for my Mum to use this year. I doodle angels all the time (especially in church) so I'm most proud of the star in the middle. Mum wanted one that incorporated the Star of David and a seven-point star, and I hardly specialised in geometric design so I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.

I've been soooo busy lately, what with Thought Bubble, making What's the Time, Mrs Woolf?, doing commissions, Sketchavember, applying for a million proper jobs and having horrible colds, so I haven't had much to put online.  Some of the commissions are almost done though, so hopefully I can show you what I've been doing all this time! Rest assured that at the end of this month I can at least show you my Sketchavember pictures, so you can all get acquainted with 30 of my own characters and laugh at how shaky my grasp of anatomy becomes when I draw late at night.

Seriously, it's pretty bad. It's like I forget that shoulders and hips are real body parts.

I'm terrible at remembering to write thank you letters, so this year I decided to draw some postcards instead, in the hopes that it would make up for how late they usually are. It was actually a lot easier to get round to it when I was drawing them, so they're not even that late this time!

Until I'm done with a few projects, have some more thank you letters! I seemed to have so much more success getting them sent on time when I drew pictures on them that I decided to keep doing that.

They did turn out thematically more boring than the birthday ones though, on account of my spending all the money I got on the same thing. Oh well, it was expensive!

Next episode, for sure.

If you're wondering why Rin is dressed and Nitori is not, this is the reason: I was so focussed on getting his body type right (less buff than Rin, but still with some muscles as he's still in the swimming team at a powerhouse swimming school and all) that I totally forgot to draw clothes on him. That is 100% really what happened.

I'm supposed to be drawing goth comics and I spend my morning on this. 

Inktober - Day 7

This one is based on what one of my colleagues imagines my home life is like.

I've used this technique for concept art in the past. It amounts to doing a sketch with a brush pen, trying to shade it with a smaller pen, then hating it and just scribbling on it and putting water all over it until it looks vaguely acceptable. It usually ends up... adequate.

Inktober - Day 8

I thought since I love my kuretake brush pen so much, I should try using it for something other than just filling in black areas. It was hard to draw fine lines though. It was also really hard to get their proportions right, Violet is so much smaller than Meruch that it's easy to draw her looking like a child. Although maybe a small, cute adult would look like a child standing next to a freakishly huge alien. 

Violet wants to know how Meruch got the 'lightning flower' on his left side. 

Inktober - Day 13

I was also very tired after getting home from the Cheltenham Small Press Fair, so I quickly doodled up some more house hobs. These are Poppet's friends, who appeared in The Music Cupboard. They're all hobs, but I think only Poppet currently has a house to take care of.

Inktober - Day 19

Unlike Spider, Nettle fairly frequently makes inappropriate use of her powers. 

Inktober - Day 23 and 24

I thought I'd put these two together, as they're twins. They've shown up in some postcards before, but they don't even have names yet. I'm sure I'll think of something.

Inktober - Day 27

One more before I go to bed. 

One of the features Vrega don't share with humans is Ereth lines. 'Ereth' is an old Vrega word for fertility, and Ereth lines are loosely a kind of minor erogenous zone that appear when they're touched in the right way, and supposedly improve fertility. Meruch's come up very dark and are unusually extensive which should mean he's very fertile. 

He's embarrassed by how dark they are and doesn't really like people seeing them.

8th January 2014

Brush pen this time! An old man I saw in Costa while I was killing time before seeing Frozen.

14th January 2014

Trying out my grey brush pens this time. This is Fox, who I bought from plushplushtree a few years ago. She was in... first year on the illustration course when I was in third year, I think.

Fox eats your excess thoughts and can only speak French. I can't speak French so Fox only speaks when Lily is present. Fox is also the unofficial mascot of What's the Time, Mrs Woolf?

18th January 2014

Further adventures in the land of Sarah's soft toys. This is a No-Face plushie made by Ponymonster. It was actually bought for me by an unusually generous con-goer!

21st January 2014

More brush pen pictures of toys. This is Tiptoe and Socrates.

29th January 2014

Another thing from my Treasure Box, this time with no outline. I have no idea what this key is for.

15th February 2014

Frank and Len from Ruby Gloom.

I threw some ink on this at the last minute, I'm still not sure if it was a good idea or not. In other news, it's quite hard to draw two heads on one body and have one head be taller than the other. Although Len also wears a platform shoe so I think he's supposed to be generally smaller than Frank?

I've been working on the designs for various aliens I made up as a teenager.

These are the mysterious and secretive Shiren. They're about the size of a human 12-year-old and always wear those long robes and hoods. All the other space-faring species know about their lifestyle is that they're primarily aquatic, but able to change shape in order to move on land.

You can see I decided somewhere in between the two pictures that they should only have four digits.