Wednesday WrapUps FebDoodle Owl and Fox

Welcome!

I’ve enjoyed providing each week a “Wednesday Warm Up,”— a day of usually quick drawing, inking, brushing as warm up to our serious art. I’ve been sharing a strategy to try each Wednesday using the iPad app ProCreate. I’ve decided to change it up a bit for a few Wednesday Wrap Up— a wrap up of my project tips for the past week or something I’ve learned that may also help others with the same #warmup4art hashtag.

Art Prompts

As my readers know, I illustrate daily art prompts with my  CLmooc friends. This month I’m choosing prompts from Lisa Bardot’s #makingarteveryday. Lisa provides tutorials on many different styles of art, which she shares in her long blog post 30 Art Styles to Try in Procreate. This week starts a new month with the theme of “Animals.” The first three prompts are bear, owl, and fox for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I used a combination of brushes including the painterly [gouache], and Fur and Fluff [free] sets.

The prompts for this week and techniques tried:

• For all three: a series of sketches to save for future use
• Bear– a combination of different brushes, looking for fur effect
• Owl — a stylized feather effect with gouache, textures, outlines
• Fox – applied the free set of fur and fluff

Sketches

It’s been a fun journey, so I hope the replays and descriptions help you see the process. Here’s a bit about each prompt.

Bear

For the bear, I tried to figure out how to do add the fur texture. I used a variety of brushes from Brenda Bakker, Jennifer Nichols, and Lisa Bardot. Sorry, I did not keep track today. I used solid, pastel, messy outline, and textures. I chose for the effect I needed. I also wanted a limited palette, so I stayed with the browns and blue. It took quite a while to figure out what background to try, and you’ll see in the replay how I finally adapted the sloppy leaves. I also wanted a little personality and something to make the scene interesting, so I added a little butterfly.

Owl

This owl was so fun to draw. I chose this pose so I could add in the butterfly again. He’ll be traveling along this month. At first, I didn’t like the owl’s feathers, but then I added in the black outlines and that made all the difference in drawing them out. For the brushes, I applied Lisa Bardot’s Gouache Paintbox for all the color and the textures. The textures are created with the thick sticky brush. It’s become one of my favorites.

Here’s a look at the layers. You can see I just copied the butterfly from the bear picture. The owl is one layer, except for the feet. Lisa Bardot explains how to create this gouache painterly effect on one layer in her Gouache Ice Cream tutorial here.

Fox

For the fox, I remembered Lisa Bardot’s free  Fur and Fluff brushes and only used those for the fox. The background is textured with Texture Maker brushes. The greenery is Procreate’s swordgrass and studio pen [flowers]. I’m not excited about the fox, but for a first try with the fur and fluff set, I like him meeting the little butterfly.

The whole point of these is to get practice– not worry so much about perfection, but simply represent the idea of the visual, and, though not perfect, this little fox does that. Release your inner editor! Just make art. With practice, I know each attempt brings me closer to “better.”

Here’s the layers. Once again most of the fox is on one layer. The set has a “shaper” brush I used to set the background and solid colors before adding in the fur and fluff– on the same layer.

Try It

So, that wraps up this Wednesday Wrap Up. Prompts like those we find for CLmooc help inspire us to create art every day. And we develop our skills every day we choose to make art every day. I so enjoy learning to draw animals, and this week’s “forest friends” are perfect with which to start.

Will you give these a try? If you don’t want to purchase brushes, look through Procreate’s native set for those that work in a similar way. Dry Ink for the solid color and Old Beach for feathers and fur would work well for drawing critters. I learned about those from Laura Eckes who drew this delightful blue owl with those brushes. She’s in Lisa’s Make Art EveryDay Facebook group and I asked her about the brushes, and she thankfully explained.

And I discovered that Lisa has a Fur and Fluff Skillshare class— with a free trial here.

Check out  Brenda Bakker, Jennifer Nichols, and Lisa Bardot for inspiration. Find their Instagram to discover YouTube channels, courses, and websites. I thank all of them for sharing their knowledge and inspiration so that others can grow as artists.

I look forward to your sharing, and please continue to be a part of the  #warmup4art series to learn and enjoy our work together! See my sharing at IG @42Sheri and Twitter @42Sheri.