I decided to sit down and draw “a bunch of cute stuff” – here is a sneak peek! Check back for more info – they’ll be going into Etsy! ( http://glimmerville.etsy.com ) Drawing on these little 4×6 inch cards has given me more freedom to draw, er, freely (I say this because I have done this many tonight – for me, this is a lot of drawing.). I know if I mess one up, hey it’s just a little 4×6 card. It keeps me from getting angsty over messing up the inking on a piece I have labored over for hours – because I have only labored over these for minutes. They are also stiff enough to watercolor.

Cute Doodles

Now I need to color them (that’s the hard part, for me). Also I sure hope that the pen I inked with was waterproof. I was not very concerned about it at the time…  I used the free Bic UniBall Super Ink pen that I received in the mail. (Any pen with a really sweet mecha mascot is awesome by default, but it writes very smoothly too.) Hm, the site says it is water resistant. I hope that’s enough for me to put a little watercolor wash over it. We’ll see!

PS. Yes you’re right I could have used the Sailor Recruit I blogged about, because that ink is waterproof as well.

Tags: art, cute, dragons, drawing, etsy

I have an addiction.

Didn't buy it...yet

Frankly I am sure I have a ton of addictions, but I am only considering one in this post: I love to buy books. And, since I only have so much shelf space, I concentrate on buying books I can’t just go get in the library. Consequently, I don’t have that many novels (though I have my favorites). Instead I concentrate on How-to books and Field Guides.

Right now I have just noticed (thanks to Amazon suggesting it) “Yet Another Art Instruction book I Cannot Possibly Live Without”. The book is called Manga Matrix: Create Unique Characters Using the Japanese Matrix System by Hiroyoshi Tsukamoto.  Now anyone familiar with the stuff I doodle will say “But Rachel, you don’t even draw Manga style anything” and this is true. But I find the style (frequently) very pretty – especially when I think of Ghibli or sometimes Clamp, etc. I have several books on the style just to reference anyway.

But my real question, which should probably be posed over at http://Conceptart.org is this: When do you say to yourself ”Intervention! Buying one more art instruction guide is not going to help you improve; actually drawing is the only thing that will actually help you improve”? 

That’s one of those questions I don’t like!

Tags: anime, art, art instruction, books, drawing, manga