Sketch of cargo ship

A quick sketch of an cargo boat. It is meant to be a bit weird - a boat like that would never travel through such a passage. I was aiming for some sort of claustophobic futuristic feel - is the passage something natural or some man-made structure? I based it on my son´s wooden blocks and bath toy below.

Imaginary Animals (2)

I´ve been working my way slowly through the Drawing Lab book by Carla Sonheim. A great book! One of the exercises is to illustrate books or stories, which inspired me to start my Matching Sock blog. Another exercise is to draw imaginary animals from doodles. I´m quite keen to do this, but I sort of want to draw unreal fantasy animals, rather than drawing on my knowledge of real animals. While at the beach I noticed that a lot of driftwood is quite strangely shaped, some like quite fantastical animals. You can´t quite see the whole piece in the photo above - but a very weird piece of driftwood! Or is it driftwood...

Imaginary town

Sketchbook Challenge

The theme for this month on the Sketchbook Challenge website is Imaginary Animals...

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.