Remember Me?!

This quick doodle man popped up and welcomes you back to another newsletter. Life is so full and busy that I want say a special thank you to each and every one of you for being here!

Apr 21, 2024

The regular zigzagging of “to publish a newsletter or not” is full of questions and doubts for this writer/artist. I do love to pull these together for all of you. My hope is to inspire your imagination and take you for a colorful ride around my creative world of random meanderings. This is not a point A to B to C place but rather a dashing cloud of unexpected dashes and sparks! All I can say, each newsletter will be uniquely filled with whatever happens to be going on in my life to share with you all!

A Gem Of A Photo Opportunity

We had just finished a beach walk and were headed up the hill to get back to our car. This seagull surprised us as he/she landed on top the stop signpost. (In case you are curious, the only way to tell male and female birds apart is by size and bill length which is usually subtle).

It never ceases to amaze me, if you are always looking around, how the world shows wondrous photographic moments in unexpected places.

The Creative Art Grid Exercises Continue

Lately, my creativity has been temperamental. I try to find ways to encourage and awaken my imagination in different ways. Drawing out small boxes in my small sketchbook is the easy part. Filling them in with whatever comes to mind or see out a window is doable in this small formatting. The dog in the bottom just happened to go by outside and I redrew it several times (as the erased lines show) to get the body right.

Adorable Dog On The Beach

Perspective can be very intimidating! If you look at my art, most of the time the characters are facing sideways or forward. Slowly, I’m trying to change some of my illustrations using more dimension but it’s an uphill climb!

New Art Materials and Trying To Draw With Looser Marks

My favorite Substack artist that I subscribe to is Beth Spencer aka The Introvert Drawing Club. She has such a comfortable way of bringing us along into her world of sketching that we all feel it’s possible at whatever our skill level happens to be.

The art materials are simple and it’s very easy to make quick marks of any subject matter. Beth is helping me grow my confidence to actually go out and sketch in public spaces. Even the thought of it, gets my stomach twisty and my heart rate up! It’s not rational thinking, but I will be brave and share the results in my next newsletter to you :)

Do you sketch in public places? Please share some words of wisdom with us all if you do.

My Wing Pencil Sketches Are Evolving

I admit burnout struck doing the fast numbered doodles series a couple weeks ago!

Shifting directions, because the Wing pencil is one of my favorite sketching tools, I decided to try letting my imagination wiggle around the page to see what appeared.

After the sketches were done, I added the little hand written names which made me smile.

Do you have a favorite character?

Grate Blob Photo Inspiration

Glancing down as I walked along an elevated grate walkway, this blob of unknown material greeted my eyes! Snapping a photo, I knew it would be some type of art and you can probably guess what it will be.

Gregory The Grate Dog

I saw a dog immediately and wanted it to be more illustrative than my usual graphic art style. Opening the photo in Procreate, I wanted to try a set of new pencil, pastel, and charcoal brushes that I recently discovered and purchased. These are fabulous and some of the textured marks you get are shown in my illustration above.

Sweater Kitty With The Shrooms

I wanted to end this newsletter with a splash of color. Imagine dressing your kitty in a tight outfit like this…definitely not happening! One of the joys of being an artist, is you can make things like this occur in our illustrations :)