Red Indian with blue eyes

This is my second contribution to the #inkscapechallenge24 which is “western”. This time I thought of a portrait of a Red Indian girl with blue eyes (yes, I know, it’s not real, but I like it nevertheless).

Death valley traditional

Some weeks ago I bought some coated paper especially suited for markers and felt pens. Until last Sunday I hadn’t used it in my printer, being afraid that there would be a paper jam with it. However I had to try it, and so I did.

I decoloured my Inkscape digital image (shown in the last post), so that only the lines were left and then clicked on the “print” button. No problem – the result was fine. I then fetched my markers and coloured the lines in the traditional way, and I must say that I am quite satisfied with the result. Mind you, I don’t intend to draw and paint in a realistic – or is it realist – way. I always add one, two or even three drops of surrealism to the piece. ..

Death Valley digital

For a long time I have been a member of a FB group called “Inkscape – Draw Freely”. As I talked about in one of my later posts I rediscovered Inkscape with focussing on creating lineart for colouring later with markers and felt pens. That made me follow the group more closely, and I noticed that there were weekly challenges. The current challenge is called “Western”. I love those old western movies with actors like John Wayne, Gregory Peck – love the horses and the landscape. So when I read about the challenge, Death valley came to my mind, and I tried to compose a vector landscape. Of course the image is far from perfect – but I’m making progress.

The lady with the blue hair

I drew the portrait digitally in Inkscape, printed it out and coloured it with markers on cardstock.

The Lady of the Forest

When I was going through my paper sheets I found a piece of Acrylic paper. A long time ago I had bought a pad with acrylic paper sheets, but acrylics aren’t the medium I am using just now. I am painting with stabilo 68 pens and a waterbrush and I wanted to know whether I could use them on acrylic paper. The answer is yes I could.

The second interesting thing I found out is that you can use stabilo 68 pens wet to create a nice watercoloury background and then go over that with stabilo 68 pens dry, as I did with the red flowers and the green leaves on top of the background.

Talking Mushrooms

This picture is based on a design I did for Zazzle with the two talking mushrooms. In this old version I’d done the colouring with inkscape, but now I decided to put up a composition with three additional leaves of grass, a grey-greenish stone and something which looks like a yellow-golden egg. I then printed the lineart and coloured it in with my markers and coloured pencils.

This

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Poppies

First, there was a ballpoint sketch. Then I went digital and did the drawing of the first poppy in Inkscape. Then I copied it four times and created the composition, again in Inkscape. When I was satisfied with the result, I printed the page and coloured it with my markers. Fun!

Blue and Green

Somehow I like to do abstract pieces, and so I did this again with inkscape and markers. The advantage of doing something digitally is that you can play around with lines and shapes until you are satisfied with the result. Then you can print it out and try colour combinations, knowing that you can always do it a second time.

I noticed again that it feels different when you do a digital inking. Yes, it is fun exploring the possibilities of the software, but on the other hand, relaxation comes later when I sit down and colour the piece stroke by stroke. Interesting, isn’t it?

Sketching again

These are some quick and rough sketches I did with a ballpoint pen – so there was no chance of erasing any wrong lines…

Red Star

It was fun colouring my own colouring page with markers! It was such fun that I’ve already created the second colouring page, and in my next post you will see it coloured.