Illustration Friday: Onomatopoeia

bee-1.jpg

What a mouthful! So this weeks Illustration Friday was Onomatopoeia (on-na-mat-oh-pee-ah), I immediately thought bumblebee. So I hit Flickr in search of inspiration and I found it in the form of Staffan Hamnäs and his stunning photo of the beastie. I used watercolour, ink, coffee, pigment and pastel to blast this fuzzy bumble with colour.

I think I fussed with detail too much, and prefer the white free version. If you look closely you can just about make out the little white ‘Buzz’ words. I used drawing gum which is a new material I’m getting to grips with, it’s excellent though, you can keep your whites white forever with that stuff. It allows me to be less concerned about my clumsiness and opens the flood gates for my Oddkness — it’s a good feeling!

Cosmic Terrapin

It’s been a long couple of weeks of tortoises, and this is the end, I’ve reached the breaking point! No more turtle-y related things now, I promise. I found a really lovely image of a terrapin by Bernadette Chiaramonte on Flickr whilst I was losing my mind trying to illustrate the Tortoise and the Eagle and I wanted to inject my oddkness into it.

Using coffee, inks, watercolour and that white pen which finishes off the image quite nicely, I was able to depict this terrapin, accompanied by a few fishy friends swimming through space. I did mean it to look like water but it looks more like space… but that’s okay!