Drawing and Developing Characters

Today I am sharing with you a video tutorial so you can see how I draw the 'me' that I use most often in my Fauxbonichi and other journals / pocket letters and I also take it that little bit further and show how I progress with my characters and how simple lines start to turn into faces jumping out at you!

How to draw Creepy Cute Doll like Characters

As you know I have been obsessed with pocket letters of late. One of the ways in which I like to customise my letters is with some of my hand drawn characters. I have been sharing photos of my letters on social media and it has been requested several times for a tutorial on how to draw these. So here I am with my first drawing tutorial...How to draw my Creepy Cute Doll characters...You can use these on your pocket letters or in your journals. Whever you feel like doodling!

Coping with this crazy life - Journal your socks off!

All in all I have a fantastic life if I do say so myself but I suffer like most from this condition of being human. I bet dear reader you have this too from time to time sometimes, no doubt, for what seems like longer than most. It is a subject that many people talk about even scientists, it is the one thing that unites us all as human beings, we are just that, human. Good stuff happens, bad stuff happens and in my personal opinion it is how we deal with those situations that ultimately reflects how happy we are in general.

I am not coming at you all 'chirpy chirpy isn't life wonderful' in an annoying way, goodness gracious I have seen one heck of a lot of rubbish in my life, some of which I have gone over before in videos and blog posts, but I have gotten through it, I am still here to tell those tales. It is one of the reasons why I journal, to get me through the rubbish, to cope and process what is going on around me so that I can learn from it, develop, grow as a person and move forward with my life. Everything we go through makes us who we are and from time to time we need to develop a way in which to cope with those situations. Journalling is my method of coping.

Please do watch the video as I can express it so much better verbally!

So my journal is my coping mechanism and during this traumatic stage in my life I have ditched all my journals and started a new one just for this particular coping strategy.

This journal is a Moleskine sketchbook and I used one pen, the Papermate Flair. All other journals got pushed to the wayside because I wanted a journal just to deal with this situation and only this situation, it is just what I wanted to do and how I was going to cope and it has helped.

In this journal I wrote reams and reams, just writing about how I was feeling. I poured my heart out and I shed some tears but it was all for the purpose of healing and gaining some perspective. There are people dealing with much bigger problems than I am and this is just a small part of my life, I need to remember that so I can heal and move forward and get my life back.

It is not my best work artistically but it has meaning to me. The little sketches and the little affirmations and words of encouragement I gave myself are what gave me the push that I needed. Sometimes I just wrote to say that I was sad. Sometimes I wrote long stretches of writing, other times it was really short. It all helped get me through.

I also documented my journey through my appointments at the doctors and physio; when I went, the advice given, all of that helped me to see how I was improving and how far I have come because I have come a long way. I even took photos as my hand looked bad and I thought it was never going to get better, even one week after that photo I can visually see the progress. I all helped me cope, get through and continue to climb upwards.

It is going to be a long journey and no one said it would be easy. I see the physio again in three weeks time, the consultant in four weeks but at the time of injury they told me I was looking at a 12 week (at least)recovery period. I need to stay positive so I can get to that point. I have come this far, why give up now?

Hopefully you can see now why I journal and what a difference it makes. I didn't write this post or record the video for sympathy, I just wanted to share another reason why I journal and how it is a good coping mechanism.

I hope dear friends that this has been useful to you in some way and I hope that if you are struggling with a situation at the moment that you can find a way to cope as I have done for me. Much love to you x

Autumn is coming - time to start updating the Filofax!

Well I don't know about where you are but for us here in Cambridgeshire, UK, the nights are drawing in, it is getting colder and it feels like we are saying good bye to Summer. I really don't think it is going to be all that long before Autumn is in full swing. We have already taken advantage of Autumn creeping in, Mr B has been forraging for blackberries and has delighted me with a home made blackberry and apple crumble. Yum!!

So when I start to think about Autumn I naturally think about Halloween too. I genuinely love all seasons but I think Autumn through to Christmas is my favourite time of year.

It was time to get the paints out and I felt drawn to painting Autumnal art. When I think of Halloween I think of dressing up. My Mum was alays very imaginative with costumes. Here is me sporting a cardboard box covered ib crepe paper as a pumpkin (left) and me covered in balloons, yes balloons, as a bunch of grapes (right). Notice how co-ordinated I was with a matching hat and stalk too in both pictures. I remember winning first prize in a competition at school for the grapes costume ha ha!

I love dressing up even now as an adult, here is me at my friends 30th birthday four years ago in a box I painted to look like a Rubik's cube - notice the matching hat too!

Totally bonkers! I wore it all night as well!

So thinking of Halloween and costumes I started to paint cute little figures all dressed up and ready to go Trick or Treating. Of course there had to be a little red headed girl in her pumpkin costume...

Cute little vampire girl - dashboard

 

cute little witch - dashboard

And to me I think of little critters like hedgehogs snuggling in the fallen leaves. I already had this guy for insets but I thought he deserved his own Autumnal background, what do you think?

 And then last but by no means least I decided to paint a pumpkin because for me pumpkins well and truly symbolise Autumn. I love inventing and trying new pumpkin recipes and seeing how much I can make from the one pumpkin!

And you may have already guessed or seen but these four designs I have made available as dashboards for Filofax, Kikki K planners and well most generic day planners. They are all available to purchase right now in my Etsy store: www.etsy.com/shop/mrsbrimbles

I hope you like them. For me right now it is time to snuggle with a nice book and a cup of tea and maybe my art journal for more Autumn inspired art.

Art journal flip through

I am half way through my current art journal and I have been sharing snippets on instagram and on the Journal Gypsies blog and some of you have asked to see more. Of course I am always happy to share my art journal (or the non private parts of it of course!) but it would be a while before it was completely finished so I thought I would do a half journal flip for you so you can see how this is coming along. I will do a full journal flip so you can see what it is like when it is fully completed.

Hope you enjoy...

My Acrylic Muse decided to pay a visit!

It is funny how your muse works, well mine is anyway. She comes and goes and dictates when and what she wants to do and sometimes there is just no stopping her. When she wants to do something she just does it without a care in the World. And when she is here, she is here to stay and all hell breaks loose and we just have to move over and let her get her own way.

So for quite some time now I have not been at all interested in my acrylics. Part of that is due to the mess and that I made a pact with myself that I would only use them in my room where it doesn't matter if I get paint everywhere, but then of late I have been journalling downstairs in the evenings whilst watching TV or if Mr B is reading or such like. My watercolours and a couple of pencils are much more transportable than a whole load of acrylics and pallettes. I know so lazy but then sometimes in the evenings I want easy, I don't want to have to think about all this stuff, I just want to sit there and create or journal about my day and not have to worry or think too hard about it.

Then at the weekend my acrylic muse decided to drop in and she stayed for quite a while, in fact she hasn't left yet, she has her feet well and truly up on the desk! So there I sat on a rainy Saturday afternoon in my room wandering what to do (Mr B had a cold and was watching TV on the sofa) so I reached for some acrylics and popped them on the desk. I opened my journal and I just started dropping and drizzling paint and so this happened...

I was quite startled myself as this is so out of character for me but you know what I thoroughly enjoyed it and I love the colours and well quite frankly I love how it is. Just how it is. I may just leave it like that but at the time I was like 'you silly bean now it is all wet you can't turn the page' so I ripped a page out and smooshed it down into the paint to take some of it off. It just didn't sit right so I took my pallette knife and started mixing it all around the page which looked really unsightly so I went old school. I call it old school because for me this is something that I used to do a lot but now no longer do, and that is I took some gesso and went over the page but just left a heart shape showing...

Again this really surprised me as I ended up loving the process, not so much the finished article but definitely the process and that is what struck the chord with me. So that then opened me up and it just went on and on. So I had a purple pallette, I tore another piece out of my journal and just got playing and that playing resulted in this coming out...

And I truly love him, I think he is a cutie pie. He is now actually available in my Etsy Shop as a day planner dashboard so it is funny how a little bit of play time to free your mind can result in a whole load of art!

There is more that I created and I shared my weather Goddess over on the Journal Gypsies Blog if you would like to check that out you can do that here.

Well I hope she is here to stay for a while longer as I am loving what we are creating together. Do you find that you have a muse who dictates what you should be doing? I would love to know!

Painting a Watercolour Blue Tit (Tutorial / How to)

We have been inundated with blue tits in our garden. Well not just blue tits but also great tits and robins. It is lovely. I love to just sit in our back room whilst having my breakfast or my elevenses and watch them feeding on our bird feeder. There is something quite relaxing about watching the little birdies flitting around and I have found it to be really inspiring. In fact I took my art journal and sat and painted a blue tit whilst watching them go about their business.

I rather liked how he turned out but more over I thought you might like to also paint a blue tit so I thought that would give me a great excuse to paint another one and film it as I go! The picture on the left was the original one that I painted and the one on the right was the one I did whilst filming. You can see that they are not identical which I like. No two birds are alike and these little guys each have their own personalities too, you can just see them shining through can't you.

They were painted on entirely different watercolour paper too. The one on the left, in my journal is on really cheap paper and the one on the right is on more expensive paper. You could really tell the difference with how the paint reacted. That being said I still like the paper in my journal so I am not complaining!

As you can see that are not 100% realistic. There are elements of realism to them but I didn't want them to be real life, I wanted them to be in a cute, quirky, stylised way because, well that is just my style.

So here you go, here is my tutorial or how to paint a watercolour Blue Tit. In the video I go through the materials needed as well as how to actually do it. You can either paint along with me or stop and start as you need to. The video will always be there for you to come back to or refer to later so make sure to bookmark it.

If you dopaint a blue tit and you wouldn't mind sharing, I would love to see it. Just tweet me, instagram, email or facebook me :D

I love her, she makes me happy!

I did a whole blog post on this page including the why's of it over on JournalGypsies.com so go and read it in full here. But then I thought I am not actually sharing much of my art over here these days. I have been a bit slack on that haven't I!

So whilst I am not going to write a full on blog post, I just wanted to share with you my little Strawberry Shortcake because I love her and she makes me so very happy!

Following my obsession! - Journal Gypsies

As you know I am now blogging on Journal Gypsies but I also want to share on my blog what I have posted over there too. So I am going to post that post on here too but only a little later that it appear over there. Confused? Yep me too!

I find that when I look through past journals, I have had obsessions, or influences if you will, that follow me pretty much throughout my journal. Sometimes they are a big influence or inspiration and they make it into other journals, sometimes it is a small stage of my life and they just stay in the one. Does that happen to anyone else?

I was looking back through my current journal and it suddenly became rather obvious to me that I was being heavily inspired by stars, the night sky and galaxies. Every other page has some sort of star symbol in it! I need to look into symbology and find out whether my inner self is trying to tell me something. After all I don’t always intentionally set out to create stars, many times I am idly drawing whilst watching the TV and then I look down and a star has emerged and I very much do paint and draw intuitively. Something for me to look into for sure. Why are all these stars popping up?

I have also moved from just stars to whole galaxies and have been totally obsessed with creating girls who have galaxies as their hair. I just love it. It is so therapeutic to create, just watching all the watercolours swirl into each other and at the end you are left with something really mysterious and magical. Well to me they are anyway.

I am a massive dreamer and believer in magick!

I am really enjoying my star gazing journey. I have no idea where it will take me next in this journal or if it will follow me int the next but for now I am enjoying traveling with the stars.

Cute Filofax Dashboards

I was fed up of opening my Filofax and not having anything lovely to look at that would make me smile and inspire me on a daily basis so I decided to change that and change that I did! I decided to get my paints out and just play and I came up with some art that I was really pleased with and met my objective perfectly. I posted a picture on Instagram as I regularly do of my art and several people commented and said that they too would like something unique like this in the Filofaxes.

I was really hesitant at first as I usually am. As an artist, well as a person in general actually, I have lots of self doubt. Someone other than my Mum likes my art? I struggle to get my head around that and I think I always will! Anyway with the encouraging comments from subscribers and the nagging from my husband, I decided to get some of my art work professionally printed and to start selling it for you to put in your FIlofaxes. Argggghhhhh! Scary!

So they are here, they have arrived. Dashboards or Flyleaves, people have different names for them, but punched, laminated little pieces of my art work that you can use as a dashboard for adhering your sticky notes too, of use them as a flyleaf to protect the pages underneath.

I am delighted to say that they have been well received by the instagram community which just makes me beam from ear to ear! It makes me so happy that people like my art work and it makes me even happier to think that you would like to put it into your Filofax to look at each and everyday that you open the cover. Sheer bliss I can tell you!

So if you would like to have a piece of my (Mrs Brimbles) art work in your Filofax, please visit my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/mrsbrimbles I ship internationally! The ones shown in this blog post are just three of the five designs currently available. Hopefully there will be more in the future!

How to Draw a Bunny - Parth Three

I am back with the third video in my "How to draw a Bunny" series.

This week we will be taking the cute little faces that we drew last week and we will be adding ears, either sticky up ears or floppy ones. We will also wrapping them up nice and warm with hats and scarves and also sun hats ready for the warmer weather. I love getting this stage and really seeing the characters come to life and pop out of the page. I love just leaving them like this as cute floating heads. For those of you that want to give your bunnies a body and clothes, we will cover this in part four next week.

I hope you are all practising! I can't wait to see the little cuties that you have come up with. I haven't seen any yet and I am bursting to see, so if you would like to share please please please do, I would love it!

Happy bunny drawing!

Art Journal / Smashbook Flip Through June - December 2013

I have another art journal flip for you!

I have been very quiet  on the journalling front over the past couple of months as life seems to have gotten in the way which is why it has taken me so long to be able to share a journal flip with you.

I have so enjoyed working in this journal. The paper is lovely and silky smooth, just perfect for sketching and for pen and ink. It does take wet mediums as long as you are easy on the water as it doesn't hold if it is really wet. You also can't get your "wet in wet" techniques with your water colours. That being said I did do several watercolour paintings in here which you will see in the flip. For me this was just a lovely size (A5). I have taken a couple of signatures out of the book but I added a lot of ephemera which is why it is trying to bust out of the spine!

The journal itself is Indigo Bloom for Penny Kennedy which I purchased whilst doing my food shopping in Waitrose for £10. I have found them for sale at Bricknells Stationery: http://www.bricknells.net/shop/assorted-notebooks/indigo-bloom-purple-flower-hardback-notebook-a5/  if you were interested in purchasing one (I am not affiliated).

I love so many of the paintings and drawings in here and I would go as far as saying this is one of my favourite all time journals. I guess it helps that I was in a total place of happiness for most of the creations in here so I also look back at it with very fond memories.

This journal is not just an 'art journal', it is also a written journal, a smashbook and a bit of a scrapbook. I just call it my journal though as it is just anything that I want to do, create and record. I don't like labelling things, I just like to journal in whatever way the mood takes me. A lot of the time I find great joy in just cutting, ripping and sticking stuff down!

The enchantment and draw of the circus

Back in November I was driving through my town and I saw that the circus had arrived. It was twilight and the lights were just coming on above the big tent. Instantly I felt connect to the circus and snapped an instagram pic as I slowed down to have a look. I was even more delighted to see that it had an Alice in Wonderland theme. As soon as it came, it had gone again. Sooner than the advertised date. It got me thinking all about the Night Circus again. Man how I loved that book. I read it a while ago but it still haunts and enchants me even now.

There was just something about that circus and the book. I can't stop looking at the picture and in my journal themes of the circus just keep on popping up. I even wrote a passage that I thought could be the start of my own work of fiction. I liked the concept if only I had the rest of the story or an idea in my head of where the story could take me I would be off on a writing mission. I think I am trying to hard. I want to write a fiction book. I do, I really do. Just no idea has come to me yet. I am hoping that it will sometime soon.

But I am enchanted and in my journal little touches of circus keep appearing. I wondered dear blog readers if you have ever been captivated in this way, so deeply that is is all you do, all you know, all you become obsessed with? I am intrigued to know, also to put my mind at rest and hope that I am not the only one that it happens to.

I love to read and I do get really engrossed in a book so much so that when it ends I feel sad that I must let go of it and that it is not going to be a part of me any more. I do hope dear readers that it is not just me.

For now I am clinging on to the circus and seeing where it leads me in my journal...

Another art journal flip for you!

I have finished another journal. I loved working in this one, I really did. I loved the size of it and really enjoyed working on the pages loose leaf so that there was no white space on the edge near the spirals. I always feel a bit sad when I finish a journal that I have enjoyed working in. I find it becomes part of me or an extension of me and it almost becomes like a security blanket. Anyway it is finished so I must move on.

Here is a flip of the inside for you to see. Have fun!

Vlog It!

I have been really bad at updating my blog of late. I just find it quite time consuming to take photos, download them and resize etc and then think of something to write, I just find it so much easier to sit in front of the web cam and talk and talk and talk! I love to talk lol!

So here you a vlog from me. I also share some artwork too!

Another finished journal - time to flip out!

Whoooo hooooo! I have finished my art journal so I thought it was flipping time I did a flip lol!

So I have done two flip videos to suit different tastes. I know some people like me enjoy a longer video with commentary on how the page was made, with what mediums and the inspiration behind the page etc and then there are other people who just want to look at the pictures. So no matter which of the two categories you fall into there is a flip for you!

The first one is the long one and the second is the shorter version (much much much shorter). Grab a cuppa and enjoy : )

Crayola Portfolio Oil Pastel Review and Artwork Share

For a long time now I have coveted the portfolio oil pastels from Crayola. When I was at college we were told to buy oil pastels but then we never ended up using them at all. Just as well I bought the mega mega cheap ones! They were so so cheap. I mean total cheapies at £2 for 48. Sufficient to say they were pretty useless too. They were dry and chalky not at all like oil pastels should be, all smooth and creamy.

Anyway I have never been that bothered that my oil pastels were next to useless but then I watched a video on youtube of a lady creating a page and she used oil pastels and I thought that they looked worth a go! (I can't remember what the video was now or the brand she used now).

I asked on the Art Geeks Facebook page if anyone had any recommendations for oil pastels and they all said the Portfolio ones so with that many recommendations I thought I had better get those ones lol!

Here is my review of using them for the first time along with a share of some of my artwork...

Summer - what is it?

What with all this manky weather we have been having, you know the rain, grey dingy skies, the cold etc. and generally not feeling summery at all I thought it was time to resurrect the quote I made last year and this year I have released it at Society6 so you can purchase it as a print, canvas, hoodie, t-shirt, tote bag, laptop case, etc and as a print in my Etsy shop so you can keep reminding yourself...

I think the bag would be great for the beach and other outings!

And the t-shirt and hoodie are pretty cool too!

Enjoy your Summer what ever the weather and whatever you do : )

Art journal play video: Raindrops and Rainbows

Another little video for you to watch as I create my art journal page "Raindrops and Rainbows". It's a sped up full start to finish page.

WOYWW - 24th April 2013

I haven't done a WOYWW for ages so I thought I would do one today. For a giggle as my desk is soooooo untidy and I mean super untidy. But that is the fun of it right? After all don't they say that the sign of a clean desk is a sick mind? Or something like that anyway. I like to think of it that it is because I have been creative. It is the sign that I have been busy doing something and well quite frankly that is OK with me!

So are you ready for the mess and chaos? There was no moving of anything this is exactly how it looks. Today. Right at this moment. A whole heap of messy stuff plus a canvas work in progress of a bunny! My signature lately is bunnies in this style. I just don't seem to be able to stop painting them. They pop up everywhere!

 

I told you it was super messy. It doesn't help that I have a small desk. Not for long though, whilst we still don't have a moving date, things are progressing along nicely and we will be moving house very soon I am sure. 

And if you would like to see how I create little bunnies like this, here is the vid I made for youtube last week as you may have missed it on my blog:

Happy Wednesday everyone and happy arting and crafting. I am off to see what everyone else is up to for WOYWW!