Miniature Paper Plants

Miniature hand painted paper plants. Tools used: white paper, watercolour paints, coloured pencils and craft knife.

Gouache Plants and Landscape Challenge

Gouache landscapes as part of a challenge on Instagram. Some potted plants because I felt like painting potted plants.

Tree Pattern

Repeat pattern design. Watercolour trees put together using Photoshop.

Adventureland film still study

Watercolour and pen of a film still from the movie Adventureland. Reference from Film Grab.

Keeping a Sketchbook - Drawing everyday & art challenges

Every new year or every so often when I make a list of goals, one of them is always to draw more. I'm sure many artists do this too and when people ask illustrators how to get better or how to find your style. The answer is - draw a lot! Create as much work as possible. Keeping a sketchbook is great practice. Scribble, make a mess, make mistakes, that's what they are for! Try not to get too caught up on creating that perfect drawing to post on Instagram. If it's for a challenge, post it anyway, at least you did a drawing today.

I created my own art challenge last November, see the prompt list here. I post most of my drawings on my Instagram and you can see my portfolio on my website.

Here are some of my recent sketchbook pages including some from the challenge.

Feel free to drop me a message if you have any questions.

A Character a Day Art Challenge

I never had enough time to do Inktober this year, so after pondering this idea for a while I have decided to create my own art challenge, which will be to draw a character a day for the whole month of November. I thought about creating this challenge for a while because I want to get better at character design such as people and animals. 

Guidelines: Create one character a day in any medium - ink, watercolour, pen, pastel, digital or it can even be a quick pencil sketch. Each character can be human, animal, mythical or alien. Post it on Instagram or Twitter using the hashtag #acharacteraday. 

If you want to join me in this art challenge you can make up your own fantasy creatures or you can follow my prompt list. Each character design can be your own interpretation, you could put your own spin on a griffin for example.

Anyone can join in, don't forget to use the hashtag #acharacteraday or #littleinkings and have fun :)

This is my official prompt list of ideas. I will be posting on Instagram and Twitter.

Scotland Visit

I recently arrived back from a visit back home to Scotland. It had been around 21 months since I left so I was looking forward to going back to see family and friends. Here are some pics from the past 2 weeks. I was at a wedding at Brig o Doon house in Ayrshire and managed to fit in a trip to the Isle of Skye. It was lovely driving up to Inverness through the lovely autumn scenery.

Ashton Lane on a rainy day in Glasgow

Storr, Isle of Skye.

At Glasgow Botanic Gardens.

Arctic Fox

It's October and most people in the internet art world are doing inktober right now. I've kind of given up on it already due to being too busy but I will definitely try to do a few more ink illustrations before the month is over!

This illustration was drawn entirely using inks and it is now available on my TeePublic shop.

Warrior Knight

Character design - From initial sketch over on my Instagram @little_inkings to the final illustration. I wanted to do a female knight/warrior or heroine from a fairy tale. Not necessarily a big strong woman... maybe she is a princess who secretly wants to be a knight? I don't know where I will go with this character yet but I am really happy with the finished illustration. Which in art world logic means if you spend hours on something you love, it doesn't always get the best reaction compared to the sketch you scribbled in 10 minutes?! That't the way it goes.

I actually drew the initial sketch for this using a male reference.

Halloween is Coming

Autumn is honestly my favourite time of year, although it is quite different living in the southern hemisphere, autumn comes in Easter. I still wanted to do an autumn and Halloween themed collage style illustration. Since I will be visiting home in Scotland in a few weeks, I will hopefully get to experience it (praying it doesn't rain too much).

I used ink and watercolour for these and played about with the layout in Photoshop. I like how it turned out, it was fun!