Ack, I was doing quite well with regular updates to this blog but I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting it recently. But I have literally just finished the academic year so now I’ll have plenty of free time for making artwork :)
I’ll post some photos from a recent exhibition soon and some other uni work and such.
Anyway, here’s a painting of a girl with a crane. Nuff said.
For a project for uni I’ve been required to try drawing/painting on glass. I’ve never really delved into the medium before, but a particular challenge of this project is that it has to be only semi-permenent, as the design must be removed after a while, so that rules out a lot of the typical glass-paints and pens.
A method I have found to be particularly enjoyable is using a glass pen to sketch out the design, and then refining it carefully by scratching away at it with a pencil. This means I can create a lot more detail and finer lines.
Here are some drawings I’ve been working on so far for practice:
Here you can really see the difference it makes by defining the lines with a sharp pencil:
It sort of makes the image look like a woodcut/reduction print, with all of the scratched out lines etc.
x
I went through a stage a few weeks ago of constantly sewing little stuffed animals. They were fun to make, but unfortunately I have a very short attention span, so only finished a couple hah.
The first is a little penguin with blushing cheeks and a bow:
The second is a a cuddly adipose for my friend’s birthday, which is an alien creature from Dr Who. She named him Sunshine :D
BFFs: 
I definitely want to make some more of these soon. Right now I have a pony and an owl started, and once I get my hands on some different coloured felt I will start a load more, hopefully to sell on Etsy or somewhere. I’ll probably put this little penguin up for sale so keep an eye out if you’re interested.
Also, if any of you are around the London area on the 24th/25th of March there looks like a really good handmade/craft stall in Brixton. I’m excited to go, although I’m not sure how well my purse will handle it…
Ok I just couldn’t stop myself with the title, but here is a little Rainbow Dash charm I made for my friend, who is her favourite character in MLP.
Before shrinking:
After shrinking:
Also here is a rather bad Twilight Sparkle:
I learnt the hard way that more complex shapes and cut-out sections (like between the tail and legs) don’t work so well, and she warped too much in the oven, hence the melted bits on her tail etc. Also the colours came out mega bright. Below is the original drawing, where the colours are much closer to how they should be:
I’m finally getting myself out onto the world wide web! Hoorah.
Not that I have much to write about on twitter, but I can at least follow a load of artists and musicians I like on there. If you’re interested, you can follow me here: https://twitter.com/#!/Chloe_North
But more importantly, I have my own website now! With my own domain name and everything:
www.chloenorthillustration.com
I will be updating it soon with pages from my sketchbook and more work as it is produced. Exciting times! Thanks for looking.
x
I finally downloaded a new version of my tablet’s driver so now I can use it with my mac! Yayyyy. I also downloaded some nifty new brushes and textures so have been playing around with them this week:
Yes I know it needs a lot of cleaning up, but I was really just trying out my new brushes, plus I really enjoyed shading the face (not so much the body as you can probably tell).
These brushes also make me want to play around with actual watercolours, oddly enough, but first I want to hone my digital skills much more. Maybe I should scan in some sketches and colour them and make water-colour backgrounds, just like my tea-stained ones :)
Watercolour texture brushes from: McBadshoes – http://mcbadshoes.deviantart.com/
More plastic charms, but these ones are much better :)
This colour pencil drawing turned from this…
to this:
And here it is in comparison to a copic marker and fine-liner earlier version. I much prefer the above one, plus the pens bled and layered oddly anyway in the one below.
I’ve been trying out rough collie designs for charms, the two at the bottom being based on my own two dogs. I will make some larger ones as well I think, as they look a bit lost on necklace chains. Below is the original sketch the charm was based on.
February is the best time of the year for snow in Britain, and this year I was super excited because we seemed to get loads over one evening. I don’t remember having this much snow at once before! It was also excellent coming at a time when I was at my uni house, so my friend and I quickly grabbed the chance to make our first ever proper snowman. Pictured below, his name is Herman the German Snowman, and he has a bowler hat :3
Also I made a little snow-pony, which is what I tend to every time it snows hah. But I think this is the best one I’ve made yet, plus it has a ribbon :)
I bought some shrinkable plastic the other day which you can draw on to create mini hand-drawn plastic charms. It’s really fun and I’ve been making little ones for my friends and testing out charms I could make to put on some jewellery maybe.
Here are some super crappy ones I did to start with, testing out pens and such. It turns out fine-liner pens smudge really badly and bleed too :( So the first few ones drawn with fine-liner were even more of a disaster than these ones below. I’ve found colour pencils have so far worked the best, the colours become much richer after shrinking and don’t really look like colour pencil anymore.
Just to give you an idea of the size of some of these, here is the smallest of them up against a penny. It’s a tiny little mushroom ^^
Since I had some free time after my deadlines I decided to actually make the effort to do some baking :) After 8 long hours (yes, 8 x_x) I created some cute little brown(ie) owls from a brownie recipe book I got for christmas. I finally had to concede towards the end and get some help frosting and decorating otherwise I would never have left the kitchen. Some have frosting eyes, some have chocolate chip and some have little chocolate stars for eyes :3 All in all I would say they were a success, which is rare for me, since I can even mess up those super easy 3-step baking kits. Also there were two little people covered in crunchy purple glitter and chocolate stars :)
A day well spent I would say. Sadly they have all been eaten already, but we still have some chocolate frosting left over so once I’ve recovered from sugar overload (won’t take long), I’ll get started on devouring that.
Also, I should probably add that the recipe for these can be found in the ‘Fabulous Brownies’ cookbook from Marks and Spencers, in case anyone wanted to know.
x
