About colours

When it comes to drawing with the traditional media, my favourite tools are colour pencils and watercolour. Well, I don't know if they're my absolute favourite of all and for every thing you could possibly think of drawing but they're the only ones I can use right now :P Plus they're not messy and smelly and don't require a lot of extra tools.

The funny thing about drawing is that even though everyone always emphasises the importance of colours, they don't really tell you what the trick with them is. You learn about cold and warm colours, the colour charts and whatnot - then you start drawing and you're still crap with using them. Okay, practising has a lot to do with knowing which pencil to pick up and when but there's also a simple thing that helps a lot when you know about it. There's a reason why artist don't always use just one colour to paint a specific colour.

Cold and warm colours neutralize each other and in the process create a darker colour. Doesn't sound all that interesting to know, right? Well, it will when you start colouring in a person's face and wonder why your character seems to suffer from a severe sunburn. When you shade skin colour with blue and green, they neutralize the warm colours you use to create a particular skintone. No sunburn effect!

That's the main thing as far as I know and it applies to other things as well. Another colour good to know about is yellow, it's very useful in highlighting and gently filling in light areas. Of course, the way you use these colours and phases when you add them depends on the medium you're using.

But this is just the way I see it, someone smarter and with more skill might possibly tell you otherwise. A great book about all this and also about how to use colour pencils is Jose Parramon's Drawing with Colored Pencils. A picture sometimes says more than a thousand words and the examples in this book are easy to follow. The book has pictures of different phases and the information about each picture is under the picture - not hidden in the yakkity yak on the page. Who ever reads those anyway? I know I don't. I just look at the pictures. This book is really old (published somewhere in the 1980s) but maybe there's a newer version of it. I think his books are the most helpful drawing books I've seen. If you want to learn from books, learn from his.

The Vulture

The Vulture

by Hilaire Belloc

The Vulture eats betwene his meals

And that's the reason why

He very, very rarely feels

As well as you and I.

His eye is dull, his head is bald,

His neck is growing thinner.

Oh! what a lesson for us all

To only eat at dinner!

A first stab at some sort of illustration. Hm... Could've gone better :D It's a children's poem from the 19th century we had on a literature course. I thought it was pretty funny... Besides, kids seem not to eat so properly nowadays either so maybe it's not entirely out of place.

+ Music: Chara - Crazy for You (watch&listen)

Zodiac signs

Zodiac sketches... and not very good ones either! You can read the character description for each sign from here if you're interested. Does your sign look anything like you? I think mine does ^^;

+ Music: Gwen Stefani ft. Akon - Sweet Escape (watch&listen)

StreetStyle

When I was in upper secondary school, I had a Spanish teacher who dressed somewhat like this. She even had glasses like that. I always thought she looked like one of those deranged ladies who like to pull out their fashion finds from other people's bin liners. Or perhaps someone deeply traumatized by the 80s, forever trapped in time. But alas, I seem to have been gravely mistaken! Careful inspection of the posts at Hel Looks and Stockholm streestyle seem to indicate that my Spanish teacher was a street fashion savy person, lightyears ahead of her time.

However, despite the pictorial evidence, the fact that my Spanish teacher had a habit of giggling to herself during class and popping pills into her mouth makes me highly inclined towards the deranged lady theory. But then again, anyone who dresses like that might feel a compulsing urge to have a dose of something extra every now and then.

Unfortunately

I know I should be more grateful,

grateful for everything I have

And I know I should be less doubtful

but unofrtunately I'm only human

This one wasn't meant to be finished, it's just one of those things that come to you sometimes.

+ Music: Ayo - Down on My Knees (watch&listen)

Images

This video is one of the best music videos I've ever seen. The placement of everything is just perfect - like sequenced and animated paintings.

Loveblind

It's Valentine's Day. It's funny how in the angloamericna world it's all about but in Finland it's about friends - I like that a lot better. It's not too often that you have days for friends.

I was listening to Jamiroquai when I drew this, though, so maybe it's more about soemthing.. hm.. else :D

+ Music: Jamiroquai - Cosmic Girl (watch&listen)

Cold

It's cold, cold, cold! Got tired of drawing this one as usual... It could be better and so on and so forth. But I just got fed up ; _ ;

I ♥ Minipop

+ Music: Minipop - Like I Do (listen)

Cookery

I bought some tofu earlier this week and have been trying to think of ways to prepare it all week. I put most of it into the cannellonis I made and today I made some out of root vegetables abd tofu
so, in case you're looking for new things to cook, here are a couple of "recipes". I'm not going to write them out step by step, just what I put into them and the generl instructions.

Vegetarian cannellonis

1 can of crushed tomatoes
garlic
spinach
tofu
biryani rice mix (didn't exactly use this but it's the same thing I guess)
(salt, black pepper, chili, curry, whatever else you want to add)

white sauce
(butter, flour, salt, nutmeg, cheese + anything else you want to add)

cannelloni shells

grated cheese

Cut the garlic into tiny pieces or crush it with a crusher and fry it for a while in a pot in olive oil to get some flavour out of it. But be sure not to burn it! Then pour in the crushed tomatoes, add the spices and check the taste. Then add the spinach (if it's frozen) and let the sauce simmer for a while. Chop the tofu into tiny pieces and add it into the sauce.

Then, make the white sauce. I never quite succeed with this one but I try anyway ;) I guess another option is to pour some sort of cooking cream thing over the cannellonis (which you have flavoured firts with salt+whatever first). But I have never tried that.

When you're finished with the sauce, it's time to start filling th cannelloni shells. Just shove in the mush and then place them into a baking dish, then pour the white stuff over them and then add grated cheese on top. Then just bake it in the oven in about 250 degrees (if I remember right) for 20 minutes or so.

You can basically fill them with anything you like, this is just one option.

Sugar, sugar

Not too happy with this one, it ended up looking all stupid!

But I hope Nick Drake saves the day... He always does.


+ Music: Nick Drake - One of These Things First (listen)