Day 9 - Jumping Bear - Digital art

 This one was rather a fun one to draw.

Day 8 - Wallaby - Digital art

I took the photo of this one ages ago. Rather like how this one turned out - more just a quick study of the animal which retained the sketchiness of the drawing.

Day 7 - Slice of cake - Digital art

I had fun painting the strawberry of this one.

Day 6 of 100 - Yellow Rose Bud - Digital art

 Day 6 of 100 - Yellow Rose Bud

Something a bit different today. I rather like the looseness of this one and it something I am trying to incorporate into my art - it is a work in progress through as some days the logical side of my brain takes over and then all I can see is detail, detail and more detail.

Day 5 Mouse with Biscuit - Digital Art

 This one was so fun to paint. I really pleased with how it turned out.

Azure Kingfisher No 6 in acylics

I love the colours of this one's feathers.  I still have only ever managed to see a glimpse of this one.  Hopefully one day I will spot it and it will sit still long enough for me to get a good look at it.

Azure Kingfisher No 6 measures 6 x 6 inches and is painted on Colourfix Smooth Paper.

Many thanks to Patrick Kavanagh for the reference photo.

The painting is available for purchase through my Etsy store. To view the listing, please click here.

Day 4 Little Bear eating an ice-cream

This one was rather fun to paint, and I love how the little face turned out.

Day 3 Little Mouse holding flower - Digital art

 Day 3 - Another little mouse - I have an idea to create a pattern with a mouse theme so I am working out different ideas with my quick drawings.

Day 2 Little Mouse feeding bird - Digital Art

Day 2 of my 100 day challenge. Rather like how this one turned out too so will work on turning it into a more refined illustration later on..

Day 1 - Little Mouse With Flower - Digital Art

Day 1 of my 100-day challenge. It has actually taken me longer to work out how to create a reel than it did for me to draw this little mouse 😂. I do rather like this one so I will probably end up creating a more refined version of this little mouse later on. The whole point of my 100-day challenge is not to get to bogged down in detail but just to work quickly and come up with ideas of later works that will be more

detailed.

The next Chapter of my creative journey

For the last year or so  I have been a bit quiet on all my platforms.  The reason being is that for last 12 years or so years I have mainly being painting birds.  I have painted 1,600 plus paintings of which over 1,100 have been birds.  As much as I love painting birds and they will always be my most favourite  subject to paint, I had started to feel a bit unchallenged and also a bit burnt out.

So for the last year or so I have been struggling to figure out what I want to do.  After a lot of soul searching, going down quite few rabbit holes and watching an awful lot of tutorials on digital illustration, creating patterns, vector art vs raster art etc,  I have worked out that I always wanted to paint cute animal characters.

My biggest problem was when I first started to paint, I lacked the skill set to draw the animals how I wanted them to look so I got disheartened too quickly (plus I am a bit of a perfectionist so that didn’t help).  So instead, I moved onto painting still life, landscape, seascape, dogs, lions, tigers etc and fell in love with painting birds.  Looking back now I think it is because they are small, have so much character and are so colourful.  The best thing about birds is that there are hundreds of different species so every bird painting could be different (I do have my favorites and the Superb Fairy Wren is probably my most favourite one of them all (I think I am at no 28 give or take) so out of 1,100 plus bird paintings, I have only ever painted one bird 28 or so times. Whereas a tiger is a tiger and doesn’t quite have some appeal to paint over and over again.

So where am I going with all this?  The discovery of birds led me down a path that I really loved, and it honed my painting and drawing skills to where they are today. 

 I will continue to paint birds (I just painted one last week which I will post later on this week (hopefully) but moving forward I want to focus more on drawing and illustrating cute animal characters.

However, I have gotten wrapped up in watching tutorial after tutorial (to be honest I did need to watch some of them as I didn’t have a clue how to use Procreate and Affinity Designer) but it has gotten to a point  that I keep thinking my little animals aren’t good enough (me the perfectionist that stopped me all those years ago drawing cute  animals rearing its  ugly head again).  

Which has got me thinking - was I good when I first started painting - No - looking back at some of my earlier works is interesting (I first started blogging back in 2012). I bought so many art books and tutorials on how to paint but no one artists style really clicked with me - it was only after I started painting day after day and working things out for myself that I found what I liked and what worked for me. I didn’t worry that my art wasn’t as good as someone else (ok I didn’t have Instagram back then so I didn’t get caught up in looking at all the other amazing artist’s work and comparing my work to theirs), I just posted it and kept on painting, getting better and better. 

Which leads me too now.  I can continue to keep watching tutorials after tutorial, creating characters that never make the light of day or I can just start posting them and that is what I am going to do. I have posted a few already -only because I didn’t have anything else to post and I didn’t want a whole month to go by without posting at least one post) but I have quite a few more on my Ipad.so going forward I will be posting more of my digital work.

I also  realized that when I honed in my painting skills, I was a painting a lot of ACEO’s paintings (they are miniature paintings measure 3.5 x 2.5 inches) (mainly birds and they are the reason by bird paintings jumped leaps and bounds in such short period of time The great thing about ACEO’s was they were small so didn’t take as long to paint and if I  messed up it was just a bit paper and I hadn’t invested hours and hours into a painting.

So another little project I am going to undertake is I am going to create an illustration a day (well most days) for 100 days and these illustrations are just going to be rough sketching / illustration - the idea is that they will work like the ACEO’s did and they will hone my digital painting skills / style.  

This will be an evolving journey as I work out a new path forward, but I am looking forward to sharing it with you.

Thanks for taking the time to read my very long post.

Teddy Bear holding a flower - Digital art

 This one was so fun to draw. Meet Little Teddy Bear holding a flower.

I have added this little one to my Etsy Cushion Store - to view the listing, please click here.

Easter Bunny - Digital Artwork

 Introducing Little Easter Bunny who is on the hunt for Easter Eggs.

I really had fun drawing this cute little bunny. 

 Little Easter Bunny is available for purchase as digital download from my Etsy Store - click here to view the listing.