Brushes with Averageness

I did a few doodles to play with my brush pen. First is a ridiculous one; the word "binocula" just popped into my mind so I went with it. This paper doesn't like being erased either. I drew first with nonphoto blue pencil (guess it's not non-scan blue) and tried erasing it in places where it muddled the lines, but it took off the top layer of paper, along with the ink. Smudgy vampire power!

I think these old-timey bathing suits are neat. A zebra frolicking along the boardwalk. Jolly fun! I think I drew too small to get a real varied line with the pen, which is what people like using brushes for. My bad.

Sticky Wicket

A rare acrylic -- and even rarer on canvas -- painting. I just can't get the hang of  it. I work too small and even the tiny brush is too thickly coated with paint to work for me. I do like the green I mixed, and I got to use Naples yellow, one of my favorite colors that I hardly ever use.

I used to like to play croquet, though I mostly liked to hit the balls around as hard as I could with the mallet.

Inkblots

I have a lot of different black inking pens. I haven't found a favorite one yet, so I buy a new brand almost every time. I want one with the darkest ink that writes smoothly and doesn't get a messed-up tip. I made a test sheet using all of the different pens I have, with a splotch of India ink at the top. Please excuse my sloppy handwriting. Afterwards, I went over each pen with a waterbrush to test if it's waterproof.

The Pilot Fineliner actually seems to have the blackest ink, but it's not waterproof. Sadly, my brush pen is pretty greyed out; I like the variability of a brush and ink but I don't like having to dip it. Does anyone have any other pen recommendations?

Neither More nor Less than a Pig

Alice in Wonderland seems to be a subject for almost every artist. It's very well-known and iconic, I guess. I doodled up this picture while exploring Wonderland subjects for a gift painting. I decided that no one really wants a picture of Alice and the baby that turned into a pig hanging on their wall. The image of a pig in a baby bonnet is fun though. I drew this with my heliotrope pen, then painted it with watercolor.

Here is a bonus drawing of a mome rath outgrabing. The caterpillar describes it as a lost green pig making a sound like bellowing and whistling with a sneeze in the middle. I always thought the mome raths in Disney's version were cute, but look nothing like the book's illustration.

Double the consonants, double the fun!

Hmm, been a while since I posted. Nothing more than sketches and scribbles lately, but here's an update. I hadn't drawn my cartoony bilby for a while. Here she is with puppets of a kultarr (little mousey marsupial) and a quokka (medium kangarooy marsupial). She looks like she has dinosaur feet!

The sketchbook this is in has the oddest paper texture. It's kind of rough, but the surface gets destroyed as you erase. It left big smudges all over the doodle (drew it in purple pencil, then inked and colored with watercolor pencils that I left dry) and pills of paper stuck to the eraser. It actually took up some of the ink too. It's better for straight ink or a very hard lead.