Thursday Art Walk

 

This Week Has Been Weird

So I normally complain about how tired I am and how I can't sleep and wah wah wah, but man, this week has been * ~ * w E i R d * ~ *

I slept almost all day yesterday. Seriously. Got up at noon. Went to bed at like midnight the night before. Did the same last night and slept til nearly 10AM. It's snowing, so it's all quiet out there like I like.

Don't know what it is about taking care of a couple of very old, shockingly chill (though occasionally naughty/ridiculous) Jack Russels, but I've been helping out on Mondays & Tuesdays, and it has meant totally-zonked Wednesdays and barely-functional Thursdays every time.

Frankly, I'm okay with it. I have rarely slept so well.

Kind of annoying to miss out on a whole day of progress, but that's just life.

Speaking of progress, uh... not much has been made on that shawl. I've worked on it for a total of... less than 20 minutes.

I cannot be sorry about that when I've actually finished three separate pieces of art for you guys today!

"Side Eye"; graphite on sketchbook; 2023 [DEDBERT, ANIMAL]

This first image is a fun little sketch of our boy Dedbert giving a Look to a confused little squirrel. This was composed and sketched during coffee while the snow fell softly, right before the snow stopped, in fact lol! I love drawing little scenarios where Dedbert, who is actually only about the size of my head, is much bigger than other animals. I have a Beanie Baby nearly his size, after all...

"Independence"; Digital; 2023 [WORD] [GEOMETRIC]

Did I use the ol Red White & Blue to signify Independence? Yes. Did I also use the letters of "independence" to plot out the shape here? Yes. It's been a hot minute since I did any bubble art. This one was made in Krita with a few different brushes. Sadly, my 2-in-1 tablet computer croaked, so I did this using my XP-Pen and my normal laptop, which... doesn't always work out great for me. See, when I use Krita on the 2-in-1, it lets me draw around things without buffering. On my laptop, it buffers and that's why the lines are more jagged. It's very frustrating.

You know what isn't frustrating? This last piece:

"Mountaineer"; digital; 2023 [LOCATION]

Oh boy am I satisfied with the way this sky turned out! This is another blender/brush combo experiment and I'm thrilled with how it came out. Especially the way the colors are blended on the mountains. That's the blending stump on Krita used against several other brushes in multiple colors. The sky is all pens with the first wet blender in Krita. The water was made the same way. The trees are several brushes and pencils in shades of green blended down with the cotton bud blender, and the ground is one of the watercolor brushes with a pallet knife blender run around it.

I will keep experimenting with ways to blend colors and build depth, I think, because it's really fun to experiment.

All of these images this week were requested via Ko-Fi, so if you'd like a say in what I paint or draw next week, feel free to drop me a coffee over on Ko-Fi along with a message telling me what category you'd like (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Location, Dedbert, Word, Geometric) and I'll make it happen, no matter what life tries throwing at me. Come dogs or blizzards or insomnia, I will make the art!

Speaking of making art, I have been working on that manuscript, still. Today's word count was a whopping 365! That means that since last Thursday I've gotten 1077 words done. Not as good as some weeks (I missed a few days like yesterday, wrote less than 100 on others) but that's still more than my goal of 700 words a week!

And how about you guys? How have your creative projects been going? Have you guys been getting anything done? Are you looking forward to working on something artistic? I hope so!

As for me, I'm going to go back to bed - yes, I'm still sleepy and cozy and dopey. I'm okay with that. I got three pretty okay pieces of art and over 1000 words done this week. I did good.

And so did you.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC