November 16-30, 2016

Hello again and "Happy end of November" to you (is that a thing? it should totally be a thing!)! How's it going? Are you knee-deep in Christmas/holiday preparations or have you been done for ages? Me, I haven't even started yet. Honestly everything's been in such a whirlwind of activities that I've had trouble finding time to breathe, let alone plan my holidays! But I finally have a break for a few days and my plans include catching up on some familial responsibilities (I have to help Santa for my girls after all).

The past two weeks have been a little nuts, the store I'm working at did a week long sale for Black Friday so I worked more shifts than normal (yay extra money, boo less time), which means I didn't make much progress on the art front. Here's what I managed:

NHIllustration Course:

For the course I'm taking we were assigned to draw a flower/plant detailing the plant anatomy by showing the geometric shape and arrangement of the petals in the flowers, arrangement and orientation of the leaves and the basic plant anatomy. My biggest criticism for my final illustration is that there needed to be more information written, things like height, depth, maybe some colour swatches, that sort of thing. Otherwise I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out.

My NHI plant assignment: Snowdrops

A Christmas Project:

For Christmas this year I thought it would be nice to stretch my illustrative skills a little and make something personal for the members of my family. For the girls, I want to make pillow dolls (hopefully that will make more sense in the next post) with illustrated images of them printed onto the fabric. I started by sketching out some ideas for their faces.

Illustrations of my girls' faces for their Christmas present.

For my husband I have something special planned. A few years ago I got him some t-shirts with "Trust me I'm a Doctor", "Trust me I'm a Scientist" and "Trust me I'm a Paleolimnologist" written on them. He loved them and has worn them so much that they are pretty much done, so this year I thought I'd make him up a set of shirts with illustrated logos on them, so a step up from the last ones. One of his favourite games to play is Fallout so I thought that I'd draw my husband's face in a manner similar to the character in the game and arrange a few other illustrations that are specific to his field, then have the lettering surrounding it. Here's where I'm at with that:

My husband as the main character for his t-shirt design.

I'm going to print it onto an iron-on and put that on the shirt. If it turns out, I might redo it next time with a more permanent transfer/inking method.

Plans for December:

I'm a little behind in my NHI course, this week we are supposed to submit a drawing of a bird - nothing too complex - and I hope to finish that today. Next week is the final assignment for the course and I believe we'll be drawing a furry creature for that. For this week I hope to get pretty far in my Christmas projects, practically to the printed stage if at all possible, plus I have a lot of shopping to do still. My girls are very excited about the upcoming holidays and are pushing to have the tree up this weekend.

And that's it for this post my friend. I hope your first weeks of December are smooth, and if not relaxing then at least not too anxiety-ridden. Don't forget to add a little creativity to your days this month!

Until next time,

Mandy

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