Both of my shops are now up to date.

Zazzle shop now has t-shirts, mugs (and more) of Crowley, Skull Mask, T-rex and Tiger (ink and watercolour version) illustrations. Also added a Zazzle promotional tool to the right side of the blog.

My own shop now has the original paintings/drawings up for sale of Crowley, Lovecraft, Horse (pencil), Bulldog and several others. Prints are also available of all paintings/drawings.

GO SHOPPING!

Here’s the 5min video of me drawing the HP Lovecraft portrait shown HERE.

Today I thought I’d just post a couple of pictures of my drawing board (since I cleaned it up) and the ‘tools of the trade’.

All nice and clean! OK, apart from the ink marks, but they just won’t come out, I’ve tried… trust me!

On the window ledge is my little lamp, I only use it to light a subject in a still life. On the right-hand side of the ledge is my mannequin, it’s only about 10″ tall and really handy for when I need to draw a pose or sometimes I light it with the lamp and do a quick sketch of it for practice. On the board is some A3 paper, to give you  sense of scale… it’s a pretty big board. Top left of it is my masking fluid (white top) ink (black top) then my pencils and ink brushes. Right side of the board is my (homemade) tub of charcoal dust, pencils and charcoal, pastels, pastel pencils then more pastels.

Hey, look, it’s my pencils and what-not! From top to bottom:

• Pipette (for moving ink from bottle to brush pen)
• Masking fluid (for watercolour/ink stuff)
• Black ink
• Sandpaper (for sharpening pastels/pencils/eraser)
• ink pens
• erasers (rubber and kneadable)
• technical pencil
• masking fluid brush
• couple more brushes for blending charcoal/pencil
• ink brush (put ink in the reservoir then effectively paint with it)
• one more ink pen
• (homemade) tortillon for blending charcoal/pencil
• dip pen (for ye olde style inking)
• another blending brush
• another ink pen
• and, last but not least, my battery powered eraser.

Ooh, pastels!

Top left is my tub of charcoal dust, made by rubbing a piece of dark charcoal over my sandpaper and letting the dust fall into the rub, perfect for rubbing in to the paper to give me a neutral tone to start with. Top right is my tin of pencils (the six pencils you see are red, white, charcoal then three graphite pencils) by Derwent. It also has three sticks of graphite (top of the tin) and three stick of charcoal (bottom of the tin). Beside the tin of pencils are some of my pieces of pastel. The thin square sticks are hard pastel, the others are soft pastel. Middle of the photo is my tin of pastel pencils, also by Derwent, these are various colours and are quite hard, good for doing detailed work. Bottom of the photo is some more hard and soft pastels.

So there you go, a quick look behind the scenes of where my pastel and pencil drawings come from!

Received a pleasant surprise today from Google AdSense:

A cheque for £71.17p! YAAYYY!!!

And, no, you can’t print it out and cash it in, I’ve blurred out the important info  :D